Alluviumhttps://www.alluvium-journal.org
21st century writing | 21st century approachesThu, 16 Nov 2017 12:42:58 +0000enhourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.430372535The Killer Inside Mehttps://www.alluvium-journal.org/2017/11/16/the-killer-inside-me/
https://www.alluvium-journal.org/2017/11/16/the-killer-inside-me/#respondThu, 16 Nov 2017 12:41:46 +0000https://www.alluvium-journal.org/?p=8207The question of how to write about a murderer whose final days were tracked by 24 hour rolling news channels and the internet is considered by Andrew Hankinson in his non-fiction novel...
]]>Rhona Gordon

The question of how to write about a murderer whose final days were tracked by 24 hour rolling news channels and the internet is considered by Andrew Hankinson in his non-fiction novel You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life[You Are Raoul Moat](2016). July 2010 saw a major police hunt in Tyne and Wear and Northumberland for 37-year-old Raoul Moat who had shot three people, including his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend, in two days and then went on the run. After six days’ police found Moat and undertook six hours of negotiation after which time Moat shot himself. Hankinson describes the last eight days of Moat’s life in a largely second person narrative which lends a claustrophobic tone to events as the reader is placed inside Moat’s mind. It is this narrative voice that allows Hankinson to explore events that have seemingly been exhaustively examined. The narrative only switches to first person when based on Moat’s letters and written statements. Throughout the novel ‘You’ undertakes the events and comments in parenthesis, from a separate voice, correct any mis-information or add in pertinent information such as names and dates: ‘The public need not fear me, but the police should because I won’t stop until I’m dead. And I never hit that little kid [you were found guilty in court]’ (78). Aside from bringing the narrative voice closer to the reader, the second person narrative draws attention to the fact that the main source for the novel is Raoul Moat himself. It is his spoken and written materials, including, but not limited to, his letters six suicide notes, audio recordings and a forty-nine-page confession, he made on the run that the novel is based on. Indeed, the novel opens with a questionnaire from 2008 from the Regional Department of Psychotherapy and Moat’s answers. This is a man making an archive of his life. Hankinson takes these writings and arranges them in chronical order and re-writes them into a narrative which veers from paranoid and vengeful to confused and persecuted, all in the mind of Moat.

The second person narrative is not a form often used in crime fiction but a recent example is David Peace’s Nineteen Eighty-Three(2002) where lawyer John Piggott’s story is told from the second person point of view. Nineteen Eighty-Three is the final volume in the Red Riding Quartet which centres of the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper and systematic police corruption. While the novels are largely based on real life events they do include a number of fictional characters and blur the line between fact and fiction. In contrast, You Could Do Something is entirely based on real life events and it is the inner monologue of the central protagonist which has been created. By drawing on the proliferation of material left by Moat, Hankinson demonstrates the increasing prevalence of the media in the ways in which crime narratives are consumed and created.

How to write about a murderer: crime novels based on real life events inevitably blur the line between fact and fiction

[Images used under fair dealings provisions]

Throughout the novel Moat is depicted as being obsessed with the media both in the ways which it reports on him and his crimes and the ways in which various forms of media influence his reasoning. The novel opens with Moat being released from prison ‘You walk across the road to the barber’s and ask for a Mohican, like Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver’ (10) painting himself as an anti-hero outlaw ready to fight his perceived enemies in a narrative that is familiar and easily recognisable. Moat is continually on Facebook which he uses alternately in tracking his ex-girlfriend’s movements and making inaccurate assumptions about her new relationships and updating his status with threats of violence: ‘I’m not 21 and I can’t rebuild my life. Watch and see what happens’ (25). This status is threatening but also inviting and can be read as a product of a generation who use social media to generate a version of themselves that they want to present to the world. As well as offering an idealised version of self via Facebook, television also offers a potential solution to Moat’s problems where traditional methods have failed. When the police denied Moat a lie detector test in a previous trial he decided to take matters into his own hands – ‘so you wrote to Jeremy Kyle and asked to go on there and do a lie detector test’ (22). Kyle and his team must have decided the case was not entertaining enough and the request was never granted. Moat again looks to the media to offer a sort of redemption after shooting his ex-girlfriend as he believes she will be able to sell her story to a tabloid, ‘At least she’ll be able to sell her story [….] she’ll make a fortune off this’ (117). Whilst on the run Moat asks his accomplices to bring him newspapers so he can read what journalists are writing about him. This concern with the media is built upon by Hankinson also depicts Moat as experiencing carrying out the murders he commits as if he is in a computer game:

‘There are two small holes in the window.

You run back to your car. …..

You drive in and shout,

Fast, fast, fast, fucking drive!’ (63)

This sparse language only depicts the mechanisms of the event and attaches no emotion to it and reads like a level in a computer game which has had to be completed. This sense of unreality progresses for Moat: ‘It all just feels like a weird video game now, a cross between Bourne Identity and Grand Theft Auto’ (86) Murder has become, in his mind, like a form of entertainment. Throughout the novel Moat continually relays emotional experiences in comparison to books and television: ‘I’d fallen in love, like in the books (76)’ and ‘It feels like I’m watching a film, not real at all’ (80). Film, television and computer games provide an emotional framework for Moat and without them he cannot navigate his experiences. His experience is, as Baudrillard describes, one of the hyperreal and the medium becoming as important, if not more so, that the message:

TV is watching us, TV alienates us, TV manipulates us, TV informs us… In all this, one remains dependent on the analytical conception of the media, on an external active agent, on ‘perspectical; information with the horizon of the real and of the meaning as the vanishing point (30).

Yet as much as Moat is obsessed with the media both in terms of expressing his inner thoughts and feelings and as vehicle to achieve his desires, arguably never as before has the media been obsessed with an unfolding story and indeed become part of the story themselves. As Moat went on the run the media covered the police search for him and alleged sightings of him while his family and friends talked to the papers to try and bring him out of hiding. Such was the prevalence of coverage that police demanded a news blackout as Moat ‘threatened to kill a member of the public for every piece of inaccurate information published about him.’

Media frenzy: Hankinson's novel focuses on Moat’s point of view, re-focussing this extraordinary narrative on the protagonist

"This is happening literally just over there behind me," speed-whispered John Sopel on BBC1, finding himself anchoring the news in place of the fancy desk-based name listed in the Radio Times. As with OJ Simpson on the road, there was a looming sense that a man might commit suicide live on the news.

This sense of being in the story was seen in a report on Sky News with presenter Mark While holding a gun in front of a dummy with body armour. Indeed the effect of 24 hour news meant police officers often spent half their time dealing with the media rather than focusing on policing. By only focusing on events from Moat’s point of view, the novel misses out the rather more odd events of the police hunt from Ray Mears giving tracking advice and an inebriated Gazza turning up with chicken, beer and a phone to help his ‘mate.’ By relaying events only from Moat’s point of view Hankinson re-focuses the narrative on the protagonist.

Indeed this is how You Could Do Something Amazing differs from other contemporary novels dealing with true crime. The nonfiction novels of Gordon Burn are an influence on Hankinson yet while Burn examines the lives of Peter Sutcliffe in Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son (1984) and Fred and Rosemary West in Happy Like Murderers(1998) these are texts with a long scope beginning in childhood, examining the circumstances and murders and the aftermath. In contrast, Hankinson only ever gives us Moat’s point of view and interjects factual corrections. This gives the novel an appearance of being straightforward. Yet Hankinson does not interject on everything. Moat often refers to his French father and the fact that English is not his first language and that he is not from England but rather from more exotic climates. This is not challenged throughout the text and it is only revealed at the end that his father is not in fact French but English and they never met. This neat undercutting of a previously unchallenged set of statements reminds the reader that nothing is quite as it seems and our unreliable narrator is just that. Even in a case that has extensively been covered by the media this novel finds a space to examine a new, or previously unseen, narrative and offer surprises. Burn’s final novel Born Yesterday The News as a Novel (2008) examines the ways in which the media creates their own narratives: ‘It is often said that today’s abundance of media images creates a screen between the individual and the world, and that this is the source of feeling we all increasingly have of seeing everything but of being able to do nothing. The media gives us images of everything – but only images’ (Burn, 28). Indeed, the result of this overwhelming media presence, Hankinson argues, is that the person at the centre is lost, reduced to stock images and repeated key facts that can be easily digested. What is missing from the narrative is the circumstances that brought Moat to that place. The title of the novel hints at a better life that could have been and the novel avoids the position taken by then Prime Minister David Cameron: ‘You will be called a monster. You will be called evil. The prime minister David Cameron, will stand up in parliament and say you were a callous murderer, end of story’ (6).

Yet as Hankinson is keen to point out this is far from the end of the story. A history of violence, mental problems, missed hospital appointments, paranoia, debt, absent parents are alluded to in an effort to try and understand, though not explain why Moat committed murder. Hankinson also includes several racist and anti-immigration remarks by Moat to highlight his alienation from society and sense of persecution: ‘At the final desk the Pakistani gets a stamp in his passport saying he’s officially an English citizen now, so all the departments come over and take it all back, saying. Nah you get fuck all' (17). Yet as Moat himself notes: ‘but anyone can be made out to be a monster, the whole tabloid thing' (20). Hankinson includes numerous mundane episodes in order to not reduce the narrative to one of ‘tabloid monster’. Moat’s various trips to MacDonald’s and KFC are detailed as are his shopping list which he texted to a friend which includes ‘a Yorkie bar and a Toffee Crisp’ (85). This is the banality of evil which is lost in the endless media representations of Raoul Moat.

Rhona Gordon is currently completing her PhD thesis at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests include post-1970s housing, the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike, post-Industrial landscapes and late-twentieth- and early twenty-first-century celebrity.

With its vast storage capacity for digitising the majority of canonised literary works, the Internet offers a wide variety of resources for contemporary readers. Unsurprisingly, the digital medium is also reshaping textual scholarship. Peter L. Shillingsburg argues that "electronic editions are now the only practical medium for major projects" (82). Due to their technological systems, electronic versions are "open-ended" and offer users "the practical power to select the text or texts most appropriate for their own work" (Ibid.). All these digital activities—the storage of canonical texts in cyberspace and the performance of electronic textual scholarship—have as their primary material the printed text. The reproduction of these literary texts on screens, however, does not lead to mere facsimiles of the printed versions but instead to an amalgam of the two media: the print and the digital. As N. Katherine Hayles points out, in the twenty-first century every form of literature is computational, since even "print books are digital files before they become books" (2012: 101). Thus if we consider the materiality and the medium of contemporary literature in terms of its production and dissemination, rather than opposing the old (print) and the new (digital), we should embrace the ways in which these two media complement and influence one another.

The connection between form and content is an essential part of the reading experience. This interactive artifact presented at the Abecedarian Gallery in Denver, Colorado in 2011 artistically exposes the relationship between materiality and narrative.

One way to examine the print/digital relationship is by analysing literary applications that adapt canonised literary works for tablet devices. What happens when a novel, poem or work of drama (literary forms that originated in the print era) is refashioned to operate as a digital text? How does this change in medium alter the textuality of the literary work? Literary applications, or "book-apps," of canonised works offer the possibility to investigate these questions by examining the different ways in which printed literary works are remediated to appear on screen tablets. As canonised works make their transition from print to interactive media, which makes possible multiple sensory and semiotic channels, the medium specificity of book-apps plays an important role in their adaptation. As Linda Hutcheon argues, "it is when adaptations make the move across modes of engagement and thus across media, […] that they find themselves most enmeshed in the intricacies of the medium-specificity debates" (35).

Browsing literary applications

In order to keep up with the market’s shift towards digital reading, major publishers such as Cambridge University Press, Faber & Faber, and Random House Group have recently ventured into the field of digital publishing by establishing affiliations with app developers or by launching their own digital publication departments. Random House Group recreated Anthony Burgess’s most famous novel, A Clockwork Orange (1962), as an app. This edition presents the text of the novel embedded into an array of additional materials that create a fully tagged network of text, video, and audio resources. One can also use it as an audiobook by activating Tom Hollander’s synchronised reading of the text. Furthermore, the app incorporates the novel’s textual scholarship as it presents not only "the restored edition of the text, freshly edited and introduced by Andrew Biswell, Anthony Burgess’s biographer" but also "the previously unpublished full original 1961 typescript, replete with annotations, illustrations and musical scores." (Random House 2013, n.pag.). Similarly, Penguin Books have digitalised another iconic novel, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957). The reader can navigate amongst a myriad of different materials connected to the novel from family photographs of the author, audio clips, documentary footage, reviews, and a detailed biography of Kerouac’s life, to an interactive map of the trips described in the book. The app also includes several components that reveal the editorial work shaping this novel. Reproductions of the first draft with corrections made by the author and his editors, editorial documents from the archives of the novel’s publisher, and the comparison of the first draft and the final text displaying the changes and the differences between the two texts engage the reader with the textual scholarship of this literary work.

Perhaps the most canonical example of all is Shakespeare’s sonnets having been converted into an app by Touch Press in collaboration with Faber & Faber. Their partnership also led to the publication of the following literary works as book-apps: Seamus Heaney’s translations of the 15th-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson, Five Fables (2014), Iain Pears’ Arcadia (2015), and Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse (1982). Their most successful app, however, was T. S Eliot’s The Waste Land(1922). This app, a prospering investment for the publisher as it started to turn profits only after six weeks of its launch, demonstrated that there is a market for book-apps. In an article for the Guardian, Stuart Dredge suggested that "The Waste Land [app] and other apps have proved that book-apps can be innovative, but… also that they can be profitable [which] will draw attention throughout the industry" (n.pag.). The partnership between Touch Press and Faber & Faber thus indicates that the difficulty of a text does not hinder the transformation of a literary work into an engaging and entertaining app, bringing canonical works into a new realm of cultural and popular engagement. In addition to the book-apps produced for canonical literary texts, a second type of app has emerged in recent years.

The common characteristic shared by this different literary application relates to the genre of the texts that have been remediated into app form. Edgar Allan Poe’s gruesome characters, Mary Shelley’s monster, Bram Stoker’s vampire and Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective: all have come alive on touchscreen. The iPoe Macabre Collection consisting of three apps was created by Play Creatividad. This interactive and illustrated Edgar Allan Poe collection is part of a larger project called the iClassics, by the same company. Besides Poe’s horror stories, Play Creatividad has also developed the digital adaptations of Charles Dickens’ ghost stories, iDickens, and H. P. Lovecraft’s bizarre science fiction, iLovecraft. All these book-apps recreate the scary and ghoulish world of these literary fictions by combining the main text with eerie music and neo-gothic drawings and animation. These elements aim to enhance the sensations of horror and fear in the reader. The interactive components of the apps further heighten this reading experience. For example, in one of the stories from the first iPoe app, "The Tell-Tale Heart," bloody fingerprints appear by tapping on the screen and the reader can splash blood around the page by dismembering an anatomical sketch of a human body with several swipes across the screen. In the case of Dave Morris’s Frankenstein app, the reconstruction of a dismembered body constitutes the driving mechanism of the app’s structure as the sewing together of the monster’s body is turned into the metaphor of reading. Interactive storytelling is the key feature of the app Sherlock: Interactive Adventure by HAAB, which recreates "The Red-Headed League" (1891) by Arthur Conan Doyle. The app includes components such as a search mode and 3D animated plot-based scenes. Readers can activate the search mode by zooming in on drawings, which immerses the reader in the point of view perspective of the famous detective. In this mode, the user occupies the position of the main character as s/he searches for clues and evidence. The 3D feature also adds to the interactivity of this book-app as the pictures above the text can be rotated, thereby creating the illusion that one walks around a room or walks down a street.

A screengrab from HAAB's Sherlock: Interactive Adventure app.

[Image used under fair dealings provisions to demonstrate the split screen, immersive approach of the work]

Typology of book-apps: paratextuality and hypermedia

The common characteristic of these book-apps is that they are all adaptations of canonised literary works. Following N. Katherine Hayles, my examination of the distinct digital features of these book-apps aims "to explore how media specific possibilities and constraints shape the text" (2002: 31). As I have already indicated, these book-apps can be divided into two major groups: firstly, book-apps that build an extensive paratextual web around the primary text, such as A Clockwork Orange, On the Road and The Waste Land; and, secondly, book-apps that transform the original text into a hypermedia narrative, such as the iClassics collection by Play Creatividad or Sherlock: Interactive Adventure by HAAB. The first type of book-app reproduces the original text, keeping its print format intact whilst embedding the text in a network of cultural and historical information. However, the second type of book-app departs from a strictly textual fidelity, infusing the adapted literary work into a multimedia storyworld replete with music, images, and interactive animated drawings that can be activated by swiping the screen. Thus the major difference between these two types of book-app lies in their different approach to integrating the original text into the app. In order to understand the implications of these different book-app formats, I will examine one book-app from each group, The Waste Land app and the iPoe app, in order to observe the role of the printed text and consider what kind of dialectic between the text’s digital and the print versions informs these book-apps.

Included in the first volume of the iPoe collection, The Oval Portrait opens with a lexia that consists of text imposed on a full page image that is in the process of being drawn through a graphic animation. Though Poe’s text does not suggest that the story takes place during winter time, the small white dots falling down on the screen imply otherwise. This animation of snow falling is generated automatically and cannot be stopped by the reader. Besides its intractability, this small visual addition expands the opening of Poe’s short story by adding information that is not contained within the original source text. This kind of media addition to a book-app text, in which the reader has no control over the accompanying animation, is actually very rare across the range of available book-apps: usually, these digital adaptations use drawings as visual backgrounds to the text or as a means of highlighting certain parts of the text. Some of the drawings can be activated by swiping the touchscreen. These interactive components contribute to a reading experience that engages various senses. Reading becomes a multi-sensory process during which the reader has to negotiate visuality with auditory and haptic effects. Auditory elements such as music or sound effects, similar to drawings, function either as a backdrop establishing the general mood for the short story or as an intensifying component by reproducing particular noises. In the case of The Oval Portrait, the reader can listen to a song throughout the whole story whereas the auditory parts of another short story, The Tell-Tale Heart, consists of eerie music interrupted by sudden sound effects, such as deep sighing, heavy breathing, a ticking wall clock or a beating heart.

Although I have categorised the Touch Press/Faber & Faber app of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Landwithin the first type of literary application—the paratextual book-app—it is interesting to note that this app also contains the visual and auditory elements characteristic of the second type, the hypermedia narrative book-app. Nonetheless, what marks The Waste Land app out as a paratextual book-app is the fact that the text of the poem is at the centre of this application, as it is reproduced in almost each section except "Gallery." All the other links, even the performative and auditory parts, include the text into their lexias. For example, while watching Fiona Shaw’s performance, the screen is divided into two parts. On the top part, Shaw recites the poem in a desolate bleak room warmed by the roaring fire of an open fireplace. The lines uttered by Shaw are highlighted in the text in blue. The text is always visible, with thescreen suggesting the materiality of Eliot’s poem and emphasising how its printed medium is fundamental to this book-app. However, besides the continuous reproduction of the written poem throughout the various sections of the app, the textuality of this literary work is accentuated by the addition of various manuscripts with edits. The book-app replicates not only the final product, the published version of the text, but it also presents the development of the text, emphasising the process of writing. Textual scholarship is a fundamental part of paratextual book-apps that create a mini library centered around the canonised text. Book-apps such as Clockwork Orange, On the Road, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and The Waste Land all place great value upon the visual and material elements of original manuscripts. Besides demonstrating the process of writing formed by an author’s edits, erasures, and rewritings, these manuscripts also illustrate the varied formats of print. This is clear in the apps’ use of facsimiles of Shakespeare’s 1609 Quarto and the first published edition of the Sonnets, of Eliot’s manuscript with hand-written edits by Ezra Pound, or of Burgess’ typescript from 1961, all of which remind readers of print’s different versions and the process of a text’s construction, editing, and production. They thus exemplify the way in which "print is not a monolithic or universal term but a word designating many different types of media formats and literary practices" (Bolter and Grusin 2000: xiii).

Different technologies and applications enable exploration of canonized literature through interactive engagement

The methods of inclusion of the original text into the book-apps define the digital vis-à-vis print dialectic. This dialectic is constructed differently in the case of paratextual and hypermedia book-apps. Whereas The Waste Land app reproduces the text without any modifications, apps such as iPoe adapt the text to the digital medium by mixing it with other semiotic systems such as "graphics, digitized speech, audio files, pictographic and photographic images, animation and film" (Ensslin 2007: 21) in order to create a unified reading and entertainment experience. This entertaining character of hypermedia book-apps might be related to the genres of the canonised texts as most of these novels belong to genres that are recognised as popular culture such as detective, vampire, gothic, and horror stories. Linda Hutcheon calls this "interactive storytelling," which she describes as a "carefully designed electronic staging [that] is best for adapting certain kinds of narrative structures and therefore genres, namely those of thrillers, detective stories, and documentaries" (52). Thus, the distinct dialectic between the print and the digital versions of a literary text offers us a reflection upon, as well as a reiteration of, the way in which the canon creates a particular hierarchy. Most of the works that we might term "Literature" with a capital "L," such as The Waste Land, Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange or Kerouac’s On the Road, are adapted as paratextual book-apps; whereas works belonging to popular culture such as Dracula, Frankenstein, and Sherlock Holmes stories, together with Charles Dickens’ ghost stories, Edgar Allan Poe’s short fiction, and H. P. Lovecraft’s horror stories, receive the hypermedia treatment. However, it’s important to note that there are transgressions. Ryan North transforms the tragedy of Hamlet (1609) into an entertaining book-game in which the player creates her/his own version of Shakespeare’s leading characters, including Ophelia, the eponymous, tormented Danish prince, or the ghost of Hamlet’s father. In a similar vein, difficult modernist literary works such as Ulysses (1922) and The Waste Land have been remediated into digital comic books by Robert Berry in Ulysses “Seen” and by Martin Ronson in The Waste Land “Seen”. These adaptations modify the materiality of these canonical literary works of "High" modernism by telling the stories through pictorial narrativity, thereby displacing the privileging of print textuality usually attributed to book-apps of canonical works.

The remediation of canonised literary works within the digital space transposes the "old" medium of printing into a new medium. Since these literary works are the creations of printing, the examination of their adaptations to the digital unfolds the dynamics between printed text and digital elements. An overview of the different types of adaptations shows that there are mainly two types of book-apps: paratextual and hypermedia book-apps. The difference between them lies in the ways they insert the text of the literary work into the digital medium. Paratextual book-apps are constructed around the primary text, the material textuality of which remains intact and is usually reproduced using facsimile, but also including various print formats to emphasise the processual nature of textual construction that informs "great works" of literature. Textuality becomes the centre of these book-apps since textual scholarship is one of their key components. Hypermedia book-apps, on the other hand, playfully mix text with visual, auditory, and haptic elements transforming the reading process into a multi-sensory experience. In this more adventurous and multimedia type of book-apps, we find that textuality is dispersed and sometimes even obstructed by a variety of semiotic systems.

Dr Zita Farkas Dr. Zita Farkas is a senior lecturer at the Department of Arts, Communication and Education, Luleå University of Technology, Sweden. Her current research focuses on the adaptations of classical literary texts to the digital medium.

—. "Intermediation: The Pursuit of a Vision." In: Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature Through Cinema and Cyberspace, edited by Kiene Brillenburg Wurth. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012, 101-126.

]]>https://www.alluvium-journal.org/2017/05/31/book-apps-and-digital-textuality/feed/08024Deep State and the Future of Theatrehttps://www.alluvium-journal.org/2017/05/31/deep-state-and-the-future-of-theatre/
https://www.alluvium-journal.org/2017/05/31/deep-state-and-the-future-of-theatre/#respondWed, 31 May 2017 11:06:17 +0000https://www.alluvium-journal.org/?p=8042Karen Mirza and Brad Butler's 2012 film project Deep State, scripted by China Miéville, tells the story of a time traveller who passes through holes in conventional history created by the irruptive power of riots.
]]>Christina Scholz

Karen Mirza and Brad Butler's 2012 film project Deep State, scripted by China Miéville, tells the story of a time traveller who passes through holes in conventional history created by the irruptive power of riots. Formally it oscillates between cinema and drama in that it incorporates archive footage as well as theatrical elements. The collage-style editing technique establishes a relationship between non-fiction, fiction and semi-fiction and can also be read as a deliberate nod to another seminal experimental time travel film, Chris Marker's La Jetée from 1962. Its title is a reference to a "state within the state," "allegedly manipulat[ing] political and economic policy to ensure its interests within seemingly democratic frameworks" (Mirza and Butler 2012; film description on Vimeo). In the context of the Arab Spring, this term has also been used to describe politics in Egypt. The editing and selection of news footage used in the film also stress the influence of the United States in what are essentially Egyptian affairs.

Cinema or drama? Mirza and Butler's Deep State incorporates archival footage as well as theatrical elements, with a collage-style editing technique

Mirza and Butler state that Deep State is political theatre applied to film (Khanna 2012, n.pag.), that is to say Augusto Boal's poetics of the oppressed, which he himself defines as "essentially the poetics of liberation" (155). Ever since ancient Greek drama, a barrier has existed between actors and spectators. This barrier must be destroyed: "all must act, all must be protagonists in the necessary transformations of society" (Boal x). This is what Boal calls the poetics of the oppressed, the conquest of the means of theatrical production. Thus, "the people reassume their protagonistic function in the theater and in society" (119; emphasis added). The aim is to "change passive spectators into active participants" (Boal 122)—not catharsis as in Aristotelian theatre, or inducing the awakening of a critical consciousness as in Brecht. The former spectator now assumes the role of protagonist, "changes the dramatic action, tries out solutions, discusses plans for change—in short, trains [her]self for real action. In this case, perhaps the theatre is not revolutionary in itself, but it is surely a rehearsal for the revolution" (Boal 12).

DEEP STATE: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised Weaponized

Deep State's opening sequence establishes that the film itself is from the future, invading the audience's hacked TV programme—to show them, us, in a thematic parallel to Ray Bradbury's short story "The Toynbee Convector" (1984), where we can get, what we can achieve if we realize our revolutionary potential. The destruction of the television set in this sequence already hints at Boal’s argument that action must replace the spectacle. We, the spectators, must become protagonists. The nameless protagonist who will lead us there is presented as a riot time traveller who has realized that crisis creates portals (Deep State 17:03). We are confronted with a dense collage of news footage showing international riots, uprisings across time, moments of crisis which render the membrane of space-time permeable. Any one revolution becomes every possible revolution, unlocking potential. The protagonist seems to not just take part, but to initiate protest: in a sort of call-and-response scene he raises his fist before the figure in the archived material does (Deep State 07:38). The protagonist does not speak. The only text we have is presented via voice-over and interruptions, quoting various sources, including the Egyptian Activists' Action plan (or "How to protest intelligently") that was circulated as early as January 2011 (Madrigal 2011), telling protesters where to assemble, what to wear, and how to protest violence-free.

The protagonist raises his fist (07.38).

[Image used under fair dealings provisions]

In addition we have the character of the language teacher. She functions as what Augusto Boal calls "the Joker," who provides explanation from the filmmakers' point of view. The Joker is a character removed from the other characters, closer to the spectator. A contemporary mediator, offering analysis, and in this case, teaching language. In Boal, "all possible languages," or language systems, include theatre, photography, puppetry, film, and journalism (Boal 121). He also emphasizes the body as the theatre's most basic tool and element. So-called image theatre speaks through images made with the actors' bodies (126), letting those bodies express themselves rather than imposing meaning on them. Moreover, according to Boal, the combination of roles that a person must perform imposes on [her] a "mask" of behaviour (127). In the Theatre of the Oppressed, and thus in Deep State, these quotidian masks—the masks of class, of occupation, of gender, of religious and ethnic identity—are cast off. What remains and is expressed, foregrounded, is the human factor.

Without what Boal calls "masks," what we see is what we get. Expression through the body is more direct and less ambiguous than expression through language. The language teacher in Deep State is a black woman—which would, more often than not, denote a marginalised character—but she refuses to be marginalised. She is also unarmed—and the editing places her at the heart of every, that is to say, any uprising. In Boal's "image theatre" the production of transitional images is encouraged "to show how it would be possible to pass from one reality to the other" (Boal 135), from the actual image (i.e. our experience of a situation) to the ideal image or state. In the language of film, the transition is employed on the formal level (the collage-like montage) as well as on the diegetic level (time travel through riots), thus foregrounding the revolutionary element in both 'film theatre' and human history.

Image theatre is described in Boal as having a capacity for making thought visible. This happens because use of the language idiom is avoided (Boal 137-8). In Deep State there is an additional factor of estrangement and disruption, as the character of the language teacher does not speak at first. Instead, it is her body that speaks for her. Using gestures and facial expressions and adding single syllables, she works her way towards language, repeating four phonetic phrases reconstructed from Arabic meaning, which are not subtitled or translated: "hold your ground," "Egyptians," "homeland" and "strike" (Mirza qtd. in Khanna 2012, n.pag.). The antagonist, finally, is the highly abstract Deep State, using "interrogation techniques" employed by the CIA on the imprisoned protagonist. The torture or "monster" scene is based on the Torture Memos, sometimes called the Bybee Memo or 8/1/02 Interrogation Opinion, a US Justice Department memo that was leaked in 2009, detailing "interrogation techniques […] for use on a top Al Quaeda detainee," including waterboarding and cramped confinement "with insect: for detainee known to have phobia" (Watkins 2014). [1]

The protagonist watches the protests, his face illuminated by the screen (18.39).

[Image used under fair dealings provisions]

In Deep State, close-ups of the protagonist's eyes watching the protests, with the light from the television playing on his face, turn him into a spectator as well, which provides one level of identification. Moreover, the voice-over uses the first-person "I" and second-person "you" interchangeably—enabling further identification of the audience with the protagonist—preparing us to take over from him (Boal 1979). Finally, the interruptions and the collage editing create dissonance and unrest, while the on-screen violence and the foregrounding of the human factor, especially through the character of the language teacher, create empathy. In the end, the protagonist and the language teacher merge (she is wearing his space suit and scarf)—combining the teaching and the protest to form a synthesis: teach protest. Again, this recalls the Egyptian protesters' leaflet on "How to protest intelligently," which is inserted in-between scenes throughout the film.

Occupy TV, Occupy Cinema

Following Walter Benjamin, one could argue that by subtracting the dynamic aspect and the unrepeatability of a dramatic performance, the theatrical scenes in Deep State lose much of their immediacy and impact—including the audience's possibility to interact with the characters on stage (as suggested by Boal), interpreting the action and suggesting alternative solutions. These actions now only occur in the audience's imagination, they remain theoretical—until taken into the outside world. The film's technique would facilitate a re-imagination as a dramatic performance, with the archive footage (back-)projected onto the backdrop, so that the separate spaces that come together through editing in the film are actually brought together in the same physical space on stage. But if we stick to Boal's original argumentation, a re-adaptation is unnecessary, since the techniques employed in Deep State may be better suited to contemporary audiences and contemporary technology: The conventions of theatre, he argues, are created habits (Boal 1979: 167). Different circumstances demand different sets of conventions. The aim is not to destroy theatre but to enrich it, which requires a flexible structure (177). Paraphrasing George Ishikawa, Boal states that the bourgeois theatre is finished theatre (142). In contrast, and as a reaction to that, his Theatre of the Oppressed is an open discourse, presenting images of transition (Ibid.). We, the audience, are no longer observers of the ready-made spectacle but protagonists in an experiment, a rehearsal [of change, of revolution].

As the voice-over in Deep State says: "I expect more after all this than images of change" (Deep State 04:10) and "in my opinion, TV and cinema are occupied by the enemy" (Deep State 35:30). This takes us back to the image of the destroyed television set used in the opening sequence and basically calls upon theatre, the Theatre of the Oppressed, to occupy television, to occupy cinema. Theatre must be accessible to all, including those who cannot afford to pay for tickets. Deep State's creators put the full version of the film on Vimeo, so that it can be streamed for free. This makes it not only repeatable but distributable, freely available to everyone. This is theatre for the masses.

"I expect more after all this than images of change."

[Image used under fair dealings provisions]

Heroes Я Us

To Boal it does not matter that the spectator-turned-protagonist's action is fictional; what matters is that it is action (Boial 1979: 122). “[T]he spectator-actor practises a real act even though [s]he does it in a fictional manner” (141). Giving examples from image theatre exercises with groups of exploited workers, Boal shows that “[t]he rehearsal stimulates the practice of the act in reality” (142). "It is not the place of the theater to show the correct path," he states, "but only to offer the means by which all possible paths may be examined" (141), thus linking it closely to the conventions of science fiction. Moreover, the torture scene clearly shows that the means of expression and of interaction are not yet in the hands of the people, the audience. The story, their history, is not being written by them—it is still a product of outside forces, be it a repressive government or other states (in this case the United States) interfering in narratives that are not their own.

In a final formal break, a black-and-white animated figure breaks into the action (Deep State 38:14), blackens the camera with spray paint and liberates the imprisoned protagonist. The editing and the "unfinished" quality of the character lead us to interpret him as the spectator-turned-protagonist, stepping onto the stage and into the action. In this context, the warning issued by the voice-over becomes an instruction to the new protagonist, to us: "This way. Quickly. It can come back, it will come back" (Deep State 38:48). But there is no escape, and no escapism, as she adds, "Those forces that torment you have, each of them, a face, address and name" (Deep State 18:30). Then, very directly, to the rescued protagonist, and in a more direct sense to the spectators, to us: "Come outside. Into the street" (Deep State 39:30). In a final twist, Mirza and Butler take the action back to Britain so that a British audience can contextualize their new impulses for themselves, in their culture, their state, their system, as an actual British pedestrian (whose face is never shown on-screen) tells an interviewer that “the government have never ever really been in touch” (Deep State 43:05) and adds examples of and comments on police violence and injustice. “You can’t live like that. You can’t” (Deep State 44:10).

As the voice-over tell us to “get rid of the body, the state and its deeps” (Deep State 44:13), it leaves us with this notion from Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed: "It is not the hero who must be belittled; it is his struggle that must be magnified. Brecht sang: 'Happy is the people who needs no heroes.' I agree. But we are not a happy people: for this reason we need heroes" (Boal 1979: 190). And of course, these heroes must be ourselves.

Christina Scholz is currently writing her PhD thesis on M. John Harrison's Kefahuchi Tract trilogy. Her fields of interest include China Miéville's fiction, the further theorisation of Weird Fiction, Hauntology and the Gothic imagination, the interrelation of genre fiction and other forms of art, and depictions of war, violence and trauma in the arts. Her Master’s thesis, Thanateros: (De)Konstruktion von männlichen Heldenbildern im Mainstream-Film, has been published by AV Akademikerverlag in 2012. She is a regular reviewer for Strange Horizons.

Notes:

[1] This document also influenced Miéville’s short story “The 9th Technique”, published in Three Moments of an Explosion in 2015.

]]>https://www.alluvium-journal.org/2017/05/31/deep-state-and-the-future-of-theatre/feed/08042With Love from Icelandhttps://www.alluvium-journal.org/2017/05/31/with-love-from-iceland/
https://www.alluvium-journal.org/2017/05/31/with-love-from-iceland/#respondWed, 31 May 2017 11:05:34 +0000https://www.alluvium-journal.org/?p=8052Iceland is, to put it weirdly, so hot right now. Iceland is circulating through the social imaginary in a number of big-budget cinematic vehicles: Dr. Mann’s uninhabitable planet in Interstellar...
]]>Andy Hageman

i feel in many ways we icelandic people are different from usa and england. somehow we missed out on the industrial revolution and modernism and postmodernism and are now coming straight from colonialism, getting our independence in 1944 and going straight to 21st century! we have a chance to enjoy our still almost untouched nature and combine it and headbutt our way into green techno internet age.

Björk to Timothy Morton, This Huge Sunlit Abyss From the Future Right There Next to You…

To foray into Iceland’s particular condensation, this essay explores two distinct yet complementary contemporary Icelandic novels. Andri Snær Magnason’s 2002 novel, LoveStar, responds to an increasingly weird world with weird fiction. Set within a variety of ecological oddities and crises that the novel regularly brings into the foreground, LoveStar contains two related tales. One features LoveStar, an enigmatic corporate and cultural innovator who’s using his wealth and resources to pursue a mystery of the ultimate meaning of existence; he’s a more proactive version of Hubertus Bigend from William Gibson’s Blue Ant Trilogy (Pattern Recognition [2003], Spook Country [2007], and Zero History [2010]). The other tale features Indridi and Sigrid who are deeply in love with each other yet are being officially separated because a LoveStar-created algorithm has declared them imperfect partners. Against this weird speculative fiction approach, Oddný Eir’s 2011 novel, Land of Love and Ruins, reads as if it’s a reflective memoir of the writer’s post-2008-crash peregrinations around Iceland and abroad. Unlike Magnason’s unsettling vision of the future that global capitalism might build, Eir’s narrator travels, thinks, and writes with the goal of reconfiguring social living and human ideas about Nature. As indicated by the English translation cover of the novel (pictured below), which conveys the text's ecological consciousness with the earthy materiality of the letters of the novel's title conveyed as mossy clods rising out of an opalescent waterscape, Land of Love and Ruins takes as its primary subject matter the prescence of the natural landscape and its ecosystems within daily human life. Eir's novel imagines alternative after alternative, sometimes revisiting the past to recover things of value amidst the ruins, sometimes sketching in future lives shaped by love when it’s brought to bear against contemporary pressures. Along the way, Eir’s novel is filled with incandescence and humor like the narrator’s stunning psychoanalytical reading of the Freud Museum in London:

On the landing inside the house was a little flower conservatory, easy chairs and a small desk with an encyclopedic dictionary open to a drawing of an orchid… On the upper floor is Anna’s bedroom, her father’s daughter, and a photo of him above the bed! Under the watchful eye of her father, she conducted remarkable experiments in the field of psychoanalysis, but had the sense to be psychoanalyzed by people other than him, among others by a shared friend of hers and her father, Lou Andreas-Salomé: there’s a picture of her on both floors. Down in the spacious office space of the papa wolf, in two adjacent rooms, you’re first welcomed by Gradiva, “she who walks,” and a black chalk drawing of two women with children, probably loving lesbians with only-begotten children. (160)

Read together, these novels act as a set of pincers with which readers can grasp elusive threads of ecological and economic crises in our lives today.

Eir's Land of Love and Ruins imagines alternatives as a way to explore crisis

[Image used under fair dealings provisions]

The prologue of LoveStar opens on an ecological note: “When the Arctic terns failed to find their way home one spring, appearing instead like a storm cloud over the center of Paris and pecking at the heads of pedestrians, many people thought the world was coming to an end, and that this would be the first in a long series of calamities” (7). What begins with Arctic terns grows throughout the prologue into a global montage of nonhuman animals in crisis, from bee colonies collapsing to polar bears starving. LoveStar assembles an interdisciplinary project team to discover what’s causing these eco-catastrophes; they find the culprit to be the multitude of wireless communication waves permeating the atmosphere, which the corporation then leverages to innovate new sectors of generating capital. As such, the corporation that was already a disaster-capitalism leader in clean energy technologies also develops the capacity to disseminate data without the encumbrances of computers and the lines that connect them—a sort of proto-Network Function Virtualization (NFV) on steroids. So LoveStar manages to appear to Iceland and the rest of the world as a revolutionary thinker who’s found a new way to continue generating profits and growth while saving the Earth. It’s as if Magnason had an almost immediate insight into how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, founded in 2000, attempted to reframe the arch-monopolist of global computing as arch-philanthropist.

Eco-crisis is a central theme of LoveStar; the threat of collapsing bee colonies is one catastrophe described as part of a global disaster

In terms of packaging the profit motive as philanthropy, LoveStar’s corporation also develops a sophisticated algorithm to process data from every individual on the planet and thereby identify ideal matches—a service that is marketed as working toward world peace. The novel’s vision of the logical consequence of people outsourcing their dating—their very love—to databases and algorithms, combined with the techno-utopian idea of machine learning to generate ever-better user experiences, once again feels uncannily clairvoyant. This part of LoveStar’s business is where Indridi and Sigurd come into the novel. They’ve fallen deeply in love before being subject to the algorithmic calculation, and against extreme social pressure, including their families, they’ve unplugged from the network of constant data flow. Somewhat akin to Winston and Julia in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Indridi and Sigurd are fuelled by their love to resist the massive structures of economy and its propaganda in which they live, and like that earlier future-dystopian pair, they still depend upon that very economy and propaganda to sustain life. What’s more, this dependence-resistance is tied to the ecological backdrop of the novel as Indridi works for LoveStar’s puffin factory. Puffins are a synecdoche of the forces of Nature that Iceland uses to market itself inside the novel and out. Inside the novel, there’s a puffin factory because a famous film LoveStar produced featured beautiful but enhanced puffins, and when flocks of tourists came to the island to see such (unknown to them nonexistent) puffins, the magnate responded by developing genetically-modified puffins that need to be relentlessly mass produced because they’re incapable of surviving in the wild. Outside the novel, puffins feature heavily in Iceland tourism marketing materials, and the Reykjavik waterfront is rife with companies that’ll take you in a boat to the nearby islands where these birds nest. This entanglement of corporate computing colonizing human love with cinema-fueled desires, tourism, and ecological devastation exemplifies the novel’s pervasive aesthetic of critical intersections. It’s as if the novel has put its finger on the interconnected horrors that are hidden within the glossy pages of an airline magazine where ads encourage us to believe in the power of algorithms to analyze human identities and produce love matches so we can find a mate and use the time we saved in doing so to travel to romantic locales like Iceland and take selfies in geothermal spas and consume organic luxury craft foods and beverages—all without worrying about things like the impacts such upscale tourism has on local ecosystems and economies, much less the voluntary posthumanization for capitalism that love algorithms entail.

As a final note on LoveStar, the eponymous magnate eventually uses the wave-analysis technology to pinpoint the place where all human prayers converge on Earth. Despite all of his financial successes, LoveStar’s family separate from him and he suffers a deep malaise that drives him to develop this project of trying to locate God. Once the team knows where all prayers go, LoveStar holds conversations with his marketing director, Ragnar—whose name can’t help but conjure Ragnarök as the Norse mythological future overturning of the gods in power heralded by weird and widespread natural disasters— about how to monetize God in a way that resonates with the rest of their portfolio. In the midst of envisioning those who pray as potential subscribers, Ragnar remarks: “Nothing’s free. Who do you think paid for those medieval churches? St. Peter’s is still standing, raised on the profits of absolutions! God could have destroyed it but he didn’t. A giant colossus raised in times of poverty and famine. We’d be doing what the Church did. We’d be creating mood around him and encouraging people to pray” (226). Ragnar’s remark sparks a short epiphany in LoveStar and the latter thinks: “But it was inevitable that this would happen when they found the prayers’ destination. Nothing could stop an idea; nothing can prevent a possibility from being exploited to the full” (227). As the epiphany suggests, LoveStar does not imagine that, in spite of his accumulated powers and resources, there is any alternative to this new brand of colonizing God for profit. Yet, the novel concludes on a note of mottled hope that love and life, human and non, may persist after the Ragnarök of the titans and machineries of capitalism have broken down once and for all.

Puffin factory: Magnason's LoveStar draws on the synecdochic power of puffins, which Iceland uses in its tourism marketing material to represent its rich wildlife

Magnason’s concluding image of life and love only in the aftermath of capitalism’s self-annihilation embodies, albeit with a critical twist, what Mark Fisher has called capitalist realism—“the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (2). For Fisher, capitalist realist narratives incorporate ecological and other disasters as merely “temporary glitch[es]” before business largely as usual picks up where it left off in order to try and override the cracks they expose in the foundations of contemporary global capitalist structures (18). While LoveStar does seem to posit near-apocalypse as the condition that makes change possible, it ends with an impression of a true alternative emerging rather than a resilient capitalism rebooting to exploit new scarcities and vulnerabilities of love and life. Eir’s novel, by contrast, refuses to normalize and naturalize the 2008 crash. Land of Love and Ruins works relentlessly to keep the capitalist crisis that devastated Iceland open and demanding urgent reaction, reformation, revolution. The geopolitical specificity helps frame the novel into a uniquely powerful instance of what Katy Shaw refers to as “Crunch Lit”: “a body of writings that collectively function to represent the 2007-8 financial crisis. This new literature includes financial works, as well as writings for stage, television and films. These new writings engage in critical dialogue with competing representations of the credit crunch, as part of a broader cultural response to, and understanding of, the financial crash” (7). While Land of Love and Ruins warrants its own sustained analysis, here I will focus on three particular moves relating to land ownership, living arrangements of love, and a new relationship to Nature to provide a glimpse of Eir’s attempt to experiment with others to bring new alternatives into being.

Throughout the novel, the narrator travels and sometimes settles around Iceland, particularly the wilder places outside of Reykjavik. One change she notes is foreign acquisition, perhaps speculation, of land: “The other day when it was reported that some filthy rich Chinese businessman was going to buy up all the land here, he [her friend, Owlie] called me and said that he never would have believed it possible to recite the verse of the Mountain Poet with such sympathetic insight: Now the North is gone from my sight, now I have no home” (185). Within this compact passage, Eir unfolds the deep complexity of global land speculation and of private land ownership in general. On the one hand, she points out how such transactions re-write, and/or threaten to delete entirely, the poetic tradition attached to the land—a tradition that in Iceland is historically less class-divisive than elsewhere given the country’s pervasive creative culture. On the other hand, she attends to the potential loss of places that contain clean water, air, and land as well as capacities for spiritual nourishment, all driven by the financial losses of the economic crash. In other words, this passage illustrates the loss of the commons—the elements of life—as directly linked with the loss of global capital.

What further intensifies the narrator’s insights into her resistance to this land sale is knowing that she still must articulate her position in relation to nationalism:

When we protested how Icelanders sold their third-largest energy company to a foreign corporation, which had taken advantage of a gray area in the legislation, besides having a bad business reputation, a lot of people asked me if I’d really become such a big nationalist. And two men said they supported me since they were dedicated to Nazism, truth be told. This crosses my mind now because I know I’ll be asked what I have against the Chinese businessman. (199)

Eir here puts her finger on a critical contradiction: at precisely the moment that the narrator’s resistance based on the reasons given above is classified by others in terms of larger ideologies, this move will be done by questioning her about this specific instance. In other words, the public discourse wrestles with individual decisions and massive ideologies, all the while eliding detailed critical thinking and resistance. After all, people living under capitalism, liberals and conservatives alike, seem to share the inability to discern differences between Nazism and Communism, which is not to claim the novel is promoting communism so much as to illustrate why the narrator faces such externally-imposed difficulty in trying to imagine and enact alternative living and loving arrangements at a variety of social scales.

On a smaller scale of the narrator’s work towards alternatives, the novel leads us through a reflection upon the traditions of hermits and monasteries in the history of people seeking meaningful organizations of life. The narrator considers these long traditions that exist across many distinct societies separated by space and time alongside the nuclear and multi-generation family households she’s been part of and/or observed. Significantly, she resists the impulse to withdraw into isolated solitude in order to design a meaningful individual life routine. Instead, the narrator offers the following thought:

I think that home shouldn’t be a place you need to leave if you want to experience something in consonance with your innermost being. Home should be a place of experimentation and discovery, a place of peace and quiet where the most natural in each individual can be developed in fine-tuning to the desires and searches of others. A place of rest, as well. But yes, there is certainly something about the family home that doesn’t quite work. And my notion of a different sort of family life is unclear. (87)

From insights like this one, the narrator records her attempts to clarify a new notion of family life and to inhabit and reconfigure homes. This pursuit combines a mining of the past for worthy pieces of ruins that might be deployed in new designs with collaborations involving family and friends who wish also to validate the possibility of alternatives. A journey to the Lake District in England, for example, includes attentive readings in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals to discover what did and didn’t work in how she lived in community with William and Samuel T. Coleridge alongside the narrator’s real-time experiences of joining homes as a guest and travelling alone and in groups. As a result, Eir affords us a new look at older literary texts while salvaging components that she might use without the taint of nostalgia that can accompany acts of bricolage when those acts seem to acknowledge that the structures of capitalism are the ultimate horizon of being. Put another way, Eir explores the artefacts that the Wordsworths and Coleridge, for example, created and left for us to find images, ideas, and experiments that could and should be extracted from their historical and ideological limitations in order to try them again today.

As a final note on Land of Love and Ruins, Eir makes this marvellous move to use one of Iceland’s most famous and visited areas to introduce her alternative vision:

Þingvellir is a symbol of the friction between different forces in nature and in democracy. I recalled the debate that we had at Goðafoss waterfall the other year, when I tried to save the love of nature from the claws of nationalism… And now, twenty years later, we took up this same thread… So I came up with new alternatives, taking only twenty years to find the right terms: móðurfarðarást or móðurjarðarumhyggja, that is, love or care for mother earth. I find them a bit beautiful—though maybe not very manageable. (156-7)

Þingvellir is a national park in Iceland in which there’s a swathe of land between the North Atlantic and the Eurasian tectonic plates—a bumpy lava plain set low between two cliffs where the plates grind and drift; on that plain is the Alþingi, the Parliamentary field established as an assembly space in 930 CE. To hike around the Tectonic plate convergence in Þingvellir is to encounter a crack in the planet that is ever breaking yet ever self-suturing by the very molten magma that the suture represses—a contradiction in fluid stone. This place is unique to Iceland, yet it is also a stitching point that Eir uses to reveal much about the planet and its people, in this case by searching for terminology that rings somewhat familiar while attempting to conjure the not yet familiar.

Land of Love and Ruins ends with a sense of hope that the narrator and many besides her will continue working to envision, build, and modify alternatives to the present. As such, Eir’s novel complements LoveStar and its final note of love and life revolutionized but only in the open space on the far side of total chaos and devastation. While there are indeed many positive things related to ecology and economy unfolding via Icelandic creativity, including Jón Gnarr’s amazing account of his political successes through founding the Best Party as well as the nation’s geothermal energy infrastructures, it’s crucial not to romanticize Iceland with selective vision. Recall that political imbrication in financial speculation and corruption led to Iceland’s economic woes in 2008 and the years following, yet recall also that in the wake of the Panama Papers, the Prime Minister of Iceland was one of the very few high-level leaders on the planet to step down from office. And so, readers both within Iceland and beyond the island’s borders can turn to its contemporary literature for geopolitical diagnoses of maladies and propositions for action produced by the island’s particularities. Icelandic insights may provide part of what enables us to confront the world and overcome what often appears to be an innate and inescapable inability to imagine radical alternative ways of being alive and in love.

Dr Andy Hageman is Assistant Professor of English at Luther College where he teaches courses in American literature, film, ecocriticism, and speculative fiction. Andy researches intersections of technoculture and ecology in the social imaginary and his publication subjects run from David Lynch’s cinema/television and William Gibson’s science fiction novels to Ecocinema theory and the machine trope “wheels within wheels” as it has rolled through multiple millennia and media. He is currently working on a book about speculative fiction and the Anthropocene.

]]>https://www.alluvium-journal.org/2017/05/31/with-love-from-iceland/feed/08052Will 2017 be 1984?https://www.alluvium-journal.org/2017/05/31/will-2017-be-1984/
https://www.alluvium-journal.org/2017/05/31/will-2017-be-1984/#respondWed, 31 May 2017 11:04:43 +0000https://www.alluvium-journal.org/?p=8057As part of Birkbeck’s Arts Week 2017, we organised a panel titled "Will 2017 be 1984" (you can listen to a podcast recording of the panel here) which considered the uncanny relevance of Orwell’s novel...
]]>Caroline Edwards and Ben Worthy

As part of Birkbeck’s Arts Week 2017, we organised a panel titled "Will 2017 be 1984" (you can listen to a podcast recording of the panel here) which considered the uncanny relevance of Orwell’s novel for our own times in an era of post-truth. Earlier this year, sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four surged (and the novel became an Amazon bestseller) after Trump’s advisor Kellyanne Conway used the Orwellian term “alternative facts” in an interview. Meanwhile, Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985), a novel that was written as a direct response to Orwell's influential text, has similarly seen a dramatic boost in sales since the Trump administration came to power. Atwood’s novel has been adapted into a series for American TV by the streaming service Hulu, which premiered in April 2017. As she has recently said in interview, The Handmaid’s Tale is enjoying a disturbing and anachronistic revival under Trump: "It’s back to 17th-century puritan values of new England at that time in which women were pretty low on the hierarchy" (Atwood qtd in Reuters, n. pag.) Atwood’s novel has even inspired political activists in the past few months – women marching on the Women’s March in January 2017 held signs that read, “Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again….”

Given the prevalence of dystopian fiction to the disturbing political realities in 2017, we decided to reconsider the literary genre of dystopia, and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in particular, to try and think through the relationship between utopian dream and dystopian nightmare that dystopian texts have articulated throughout the twentieth century.

On the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War, an ageing H. G. Wells visited Australia, delivering two lectures that were broadcast on Australian radio. In his lecture on "Utopias," he remarked that "[t]hroughout the ages the Utopias reflect the anxieties and discontents amidst which they were produced. They are, so to speak, shadows of light thrown by darknesses" (1982: 117). Wells recognised the intrinsic connection between utopian dreams and the "dark" conditions that inspire writers to venture into the realms of the speculative imagination. Indeed, many of Wells’ major works themselves explore how the vision of the good society that is, as Thomas More’s coinage dictates, "no place" can slide into its dystopian counterpart. The Time Machine (1895) initially strikes the Time Traveller as a pastoral Arcadia until he comes to understand that the graceful, childlike Eloi are, in fact, fatted cattle for the troglodytic labouring Morlocks. The Sleeper Awakes (1910) also plays with utopian form, building on William Morris’ premise of miraculously waking up in the utopian future in News From Nowhere (1890). However, instead of waking up in a world of social equality, Wells’ protagonist Graham discovers that the technologically advanced world of 2100 has evolved into a distinctly anti-utopian capitalist society of "higher buildings, bigger towns, wickeder capitalists, and labour more down-trodden than ever" (Wells 2016: 591).

Will 2017 be 1984? With his attacks on "fake media" and use of "alternative facts" the election of Donald Trump reveals an increasingly Orwellian reality

Although it had been coined by John Stuart Mill in 1868, the term "dystopia" came to be used to describe speculative visions of the future that lacked the optimism of utopia’s "good society." After a boom in utopian novels of the fin de siècle, the focus on socialist visions of the collective future slid into a palpable fear of the kind of modernity that technology could deliver and the loss of liberal values implied in enforced collectivisation. The extraordinary popularity of H. G. Wells’ utopian visions in novels such as A Modern Utopia (1900) and Men Like Gods (1923) provoked satirical responses among his contemporaries. As he explained in 1947, E. M. Forster conceived of his futuristic speculative story "The Machine Stops" (1909) as a "reaction to one of the earlier heavens of H. G. Wells" (1947: vii), which has degenerated into a dystopian nightmare. The techno-utopianism of Wells’ Men Like Gods similarly inspired Aldous Huxley’s eugenicist dystopia, Brave New World (1932). In 1962, Huxley recalled his frustration with Wells’ utopian adventure story: "Men Like Gods annoyed me to the point of planning a parody, but when I started writing I found the idea of a negative Utopia so interesting that I forgot about Wells and launched into [Brave New World]” (Huxley in Collins 1973: 41). As Huxley cited the Russian philosopher Nicolas Berdiaeff’s in the epigraph to Brave New World, "Utopias seem much more attainable than one may have previously thought. And we are now faced with a much more frightening thought: how do we prevent their permanent fulfillment?" (Berdiaeff in Huxley 1994: n.pag.).

In the 1930s, then, science fiction became increasingly concerned with using its speculative mode to examine the dangers of fascism. The growing presence on the international stage of Hitler’s Nazism led many writers to consider the dystopian realities of wholesale attempts at social engineering; something which had plagued the utopian novel since More’s construction of the ideal humanist society in Utopia (1516)—which, of course, had included an authoritarian monarch and also slavery. Written during the early years of the Great Depression in the 1930s, Huxley’s dystopia anticipates the inequality of Orwell’s Oceania, with the dehumanizing triumph of Western capitalism in the year 632 A.F. (“After Ford”).

If Huxley’s eugenicist vision of "achieved utopia" in Brave New World anticipated the popularisation of Fascist ideology in Germany in the 1930s, the dangers of the Nazi cult of masculinity was challenged in a different way by a number of feminist anti-fascist dystopias. Naomi Mitchison’s We Have Been Warned (1935) is set in the interwar period of the early 1930s, revealing the possible future of a fascist Britain; an ideology which she describes in The Home and a Changing Civilisation (1934) as "this final and peculiarly revolting end-form of capitalism" (102). Storm Jameson’s In the Second Year (1936) similarly brings German fascism closer to home in a vision of a Britain colonised by fascism; as do Ruthven Todd’s Over the Mountain (1939) and Winifred Holtby’s play Take Back Your Freedom (1939). Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937) (published under the pseudonym of Murray Constantine) offers a more chilling vision of fascist domination from the perspective of more than 700 years in the future of Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich.

From utopian dream to dystopian nightmare: the popular utopian novels of H. G. Wells inspired writers such as E. M. Forster and Aldous Huxley to produce dystopian responses to Wells' vision of the future

But it is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) that has had the most lasting influence on the dystopian imagination. In the near future 1980s, Britain has become Airstrip One, an outpost of the empire of Oceania (one of three global super-states, all of which are collectivist). WWII led to an atomic war in the 1950s and by the 1960s English Socialism has become Ingsoc and won the Revolution to overthrow the capitalists, about whom no one can recall anything other than their quaint top hats. Ingsoc is presided over by a Stalin-like leader known as Big Brother, whose ubiquitous face is described as offering "heavy calm, protecting: but what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache?" (107).

What is so striking about Orwell’s dystopian vision is the combination of high-tech surveillance with the decidedly low-tech setting of decaying Victorian architecture, electricity shortages, and impoverished, rat-infested slums. Orwell’s near-future London is in a permanent state of war, suffering Blitz-style bombings and wartime rationing whilst its citizens live under the microscopic watch of complete state surveillance. The capital is described as "vast and ruinous, [the] city of a million dustbins" (77), where everything smells of boiled cabbage and people with decaying teeth trudge around in leaky shoes, darning old socks, bartering, and trying to fix their broken plumbing. The state’s Huxleyesque synthetic food—saccharine tablets, grey stews of meat substitute, and oily gin—is countered by a black market of real coffee, chocolate, butter, and cigars. The novel is focalised through Party worker Winston Smith, whose work at the Ministry of Truth involves rewriting records and newspaper articles in a ceaseless effort to control the official historical record. As people are murdered or disappear into the shadowy police state (a process known as "vaporisation"), an army of bureaucrats like Winston must rewrite events to obliterate their record of ever having existed. Orwell’s friend Arthur Koestler had covered similar ground in his influential account of Stalin’s purges in Darkness at Noon (1940), which depicts the final collapse of Russia’s early revolutionary utopianism during "the Terror" as Stalin’s police state murdered Bolsheviks and proceeded to airbrush their existence out of official recorded Soviet history. Likewise, Winston bears witness to the airbrushing of history. "[I]t was not even forgery,” he thinks, “[i]t was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another" (43). Only fragments of memories and ideas exists to counter the official history and claim of the Party, as when Smith dreams of freedom in a country idyll an wakes up with the name "Shakespeare" on his lips.

For the modern reader, the book is replete with contemporary resonance. The leaders in Oceania control their people through targeted hatred and predict what they do before they do it. There are uncomfortable echoes of the dark side of a surveillance society and big data: the secret police can even monitor you through your television. Double-think dominates a world where those in power can believe contradictory things simultaneously and bend reality at will. Opening up Orwell’s book today, Oceania’s propaganda slogan "ignorance is strength" rings far too familiar for comfort. However, the real warning of the novel concerns the destruction of objective reality and loss of humanity and sense of self that it brings. The world of Winston Smith is one where, aside from one fleeting incident, it is impossible to know if past events ever took place or what is truly happening in the present: when Smith opens his illicit diary he is unsure even of the exact date. This uncertainty leaves the inhabitants of Oceania adrift, left only with a feeling in the pit of their stomach that this world is not somehow right. As Ben Pimlott argued, Orwell’s dystopia hinges upon a very modern conundrum:

The novel can be seen as an account of the forces that endanger liberty and of the need to resist them. Most of these forces can be summed up in a single word: lies. The author offers a political choice—between the protection of truth, and a slide into the expedient falsehood for the benefit of rulers and the exploitation of the ruled, in whom genuine feeling and ultimate hope reside. (n.pag.)

Exactly such insulation was attempted by the Nazis and Stalin’s Soviet regime, both of which sought to create their own "moral universe" where laws of science, historical knowledge and objective reality were subsumed by ideology, from Goebbels' famous claim that Jesus wasn’t Jewish to attempts in the USSR to make biology fit with Marxist dialectical patterns (Overy 2004). Primo Levi spoke of how the guards in the camp would torture inmates with the idea that no one in the future would ever believe the victims (Levi 1989).

Frighteningly recognisable: Orwell's classic text outlines an authoritarian future state whose surveillance technology has become reality in the 21st century

Orwell wrote in 1942 of how he feared just such a pattern of falsehood subsuming objective reality. In his reflections on the distortions and lies around the Spanish Civil War he outlined his fear that "the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world" (1970: 258). He imagined "a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past… if the Leader says of such and such an event, 'It never happened'—well, it never happened. If he says two and two are five… two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs" (Orwell 2004, 170). It is a prospect that also carries down to us in a world of fabricated events, denial of self-evident truths and "alternative facts."

The distortion of reality reaches its terrifying endpoint when Smith, being tortured in the Ministry of Love by his erstwhile protector O’Brien, is made to believe two plus two equals five and that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. He then asks if Big Brother is a real person:

Smith: Does Big Brother exist?

O’Brien: Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.

Smith: Does he exist in the same way as I exist?

O’Brien: You do not exist. (Orwell 1990: 271-2)

In Nineteen Eighty-Four we find a new incarnation of the dystopian vision of techno-modernity that Yevgeny Zamyatin had memorably invoked in We (My) (1924), but updated to match the context of post-WWII economic depression in Britain. As we have already seen, it is common for dystopian novels to reflect upon utopian dreams and attempts at social engineering. Here, Orwell stages the utopian dream of socio-economic equality, with its concomitant reduction of the length of the working day and an envisioned life of plenty for all workers; the dream that Wells conquered through scientific innovation in A Modern Utopia and Men Like Gods. In the war-torn history of Oceania, however, the capitalist manufacturing problem of over-production has triumphed over the utopian socialist dream of reducing hard toil in favour of pleasurable, socially productive labour.

Many reading Nineteen Eighty-Four were struck by the novel’s terrifying realism and familiarity: so much so that readers of illegal copies snuck behind the iron curtain believed the book to have been written by someone close to Stalin (Hitchens 2002). However, despite its apparently Soviet contours (with Big Brother’s Stalinist cult of personality and the destruction of individualism in favour of collectivism), Orwell’s totalitarian state actually represents a much more capitalist vision of the future than is usually acknowledged, in line with the critique of capitalism found in the earlier utopias of Wells, Bogdanov, and Tolstoy. Orwell himself had insisted that Nineteen Eighty-Four had been written "against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it" (Orwell 1970: 28). Thus, as Winston reads in Goldstein’s text-within-the-text, the "idea of an earthly paradise in which men should live together in a state of brotherhood, without laws and without brute labour […] had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realisable" (Orwell 1990: 212-13).

As Winston’s surrender at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four shows us, the resonant power of dystopian novels lies in their fraught relationship with utopian dreaming. Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, Burdekin's Swastika Night and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four thus force the reader, as Erica Gottlieb suggests, to consider "how an originally utopian promise was abused, betrayed, or, ironically, fulfilled so as to create tragic consequences for humanity" (8).

What do we mean by this odd subject, Speculative Fiction? If we’re dealing with extrapolative fictions, expressly concerned with imagining alternate futures, presents and pasts, when does now begin and end? When we trace back to identify the points of origin of Speculative Fictions from the blending or breaching of Science Fiction and Fantasy, to Surrealism, to the Gothic, we trace or retrace a history as an argument. I tend to imagine the period since 1980 as marking a clear boundary shift across different cultural fields because of historical, political and theoretical shifts, but of course this is misleading. As Cathryn Merla-Watson’s contribution to this special issue of Alluvium illustrates, an apparent recent critical move towards the recognition of an aesthetic, such as Latin@futurism, may actually be decades behind the actual cultural producers because of all the forces of heteropatriarchy and whiteness ranged against not acknowledging or misrecognising aesthetics which do not support them.

Speculative fiction and world making

[Image by Flickr GôDiNô under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License]

The term Speculative Fiction is, I believe, a usefully fuzzy term for designating a whole range of possible ways of making narrative. In part it seems imprecise because it moves away somewhat from the distinctions between Science Fiction and Fantasy that defined the establishment of the study of Science Fiction, and there are times when the clarity and precision of separation are extremely useful. But I think the relative imprecision. Or rather, the flexibility, of the term can also enable a higher level grasp of what we are dealing with: fictions which, above all, negate the present conditions of social expectation and the limitations of what can be expected to make sense. Speculative Fiction, in its breadth, says that we can make sense of the stories of wildly unlike events which do not seem to bear direct relation to our present times and concerns, and that those meanings can be powerful, significant and valuable to us.

Speculative fiction and its meaningful, but 'unlike', events

[Image by Flickr GôDiNô under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License]

Speculative Fiction might convey the urgency of imagining better utopian worlds or simply the need to imagine alternatives for a brief respite, an escape from the daily grind to win back that bit of energy it took that you know you’ll need for dealing with what comes tomorrow. To that end, what is presented here is a range of approaches to conceiving of the social function of speculative fiction and diverse source texts to engage with. In her article “The Altermundos of Latin@futurism,” Cathryn Merla-Watson gives a virtuoso survey of the richness of Latin@futurism. She details how the aesthetic and theoretical history of Latin@futurism draws together intersections with Science Fiction and the Gothic, while articulating its distinctness as a field and its sheer cultural breadth and diversity. Sébastien Doubinsky explores Jordan Krall’s use of 9/11 as a setting for Speculative Fiction in “Jordan Krall's Speculative Fiction.” In this article, Doubinsky links Krall’s engagement with post-9/11 America with various avant-garde and speculative pre-texts – from William Burroughs and J. G. Ballard to Zamyatin and Bulgakov – examining the ways this distinctly politicised aesthetic of representation functions. This is followed by Martyn Colebrook’s article “Martin MacInnes and Celtic SF,” which examines MacInnes’ Celtic speculative fiction. Colebrook situates MacInnes’ text in light of his precursors in both the Tartan Noir subgenre and more broadly in Scottish fiction and science fiction, particularly the work of Iain Banks,Irvine Welsh and Alasdair Gray to formulate a clear set of confluences with this distinctly Scottish tradition. Finally, the special issue concludes with my own essay “Speculative Resistance in Lost Girls.” Here I consider Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’sLost Girls in order to examine the intersections between that polemical text and Moore’s narrative poem celebrating gay love and homosexual culture in history, The Mirror of Love.

Between these diverse contexts what emerges is a sense of Speculative Fiction as an extension of political engagement and as a political engagement in itself. The links between speculative fictions and identity are clear, as are the ways in which the distancing effects afforded by fantastical and science fictional techniques provide an opportunity for forceful political ideas. What every Speculative Fiction has in common is its assertion, explicit or implicit, of its own self-definition: this imaginary world is worth sharing in because it means something to me and it can mean something to you too.

Dr Mark P. Williams is currently a Teaching Fellow at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany, where he has worked since 2014. He previously taught at the University of East Anglia (UK) and Victoria University of Wellington (Aotearoa New Zealand), and has also been a political reporter for Scoop Independent Media in the NZ Parliamentary Press Gallery. His PhD, Radical Fantasy: A Study of Left Radical Politics in the Fantasy Writing of Michael Moorcock, Angela Carter, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and China Miéville, was awarded from the University of East Anglia.

]]>https://www.alluvium-journal.org/2017/03/15/contemporary-speculative-fiction-editorial-introduction/feed/07796The Altermundos of Latin@futurismhttps://www.alluvium-journal.org/2017/03/15/the-altermundos-of-latinfuturism/
https://www.alluvium-journal.org/2017/03/15/the-altermundos-of-latinfuturism/#respondWed, 15 Mar 2017 16:46:25 +0000https://www.alluvium-journal.org/?p=7845Latin@futurism has yet to register within the hegemonic popular imagination—one historically drenched in whiteness and heteropatriarchy. At best, it is recognized as a quaint...
]]>Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson

New Mestiz@ Aesthetics 2.0

Latin@futurism has yet to register within the hegemonic popular imagination—one historically drenched in whiteness and heteropatriarchy. At best, it is recognized as a quaint oddity, an errant outlier, or banished to now tired conversations of magical realism. At worst, it is merely not acknowledged. However, after co-curating and editing with B.V. Olguín two thematic dossiers in the journal Aztlán and a related collected works entitled Altermundos: Latin@ Speculative Literature and Popular, both dedicated to theorizing this nascent, though vibrant, field, I am here to assure you, dear reader, that the Latin@ speculative arts are thriving and continuing to proliferate. Moreover, Latin@futurism and alternative futurisms are revolutionizing how we think about the speculative genre at large.

It's Alive! Latin@ futurism is enjoying a renaissance in the contemporary period

Recently, there has been a veritable renaissance of Latin@ speculative texts, encompassing, most famously, Dominican American writer and public intellectual Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize winning 2007 novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This brilliant speculative novel marshals and combines elements of sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and myriad popular cultural references to portray the brutality of the US-sponsored dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo from 1930 to 1961 and its haunting legacies. It further emblematizes the heterogeneity and trans-Americanity animating Latin@futurist texts, and demonstrates how Latin@futurism may function as incisive social critique. Díaz’s novel is a literary coup d’état for its sheer narrative ingenuity in addition to adumbrating that Latin@s are in fact writing speculative fiction and radically transforming the genre. Importantly, too, it contributed to launching the “speculative turn” within Latin@ studies.

Latin@futurism references a spectrum of speculative aesthetics produced by U.S. Latin@s, including Chican@s, Puerto Ricans, Dominican Americans, Cuban Americans, and other Latin American immigrant populations. It also includes innovative cultural productions stemming from the hybrid and fluid borderlands spaces, including the U.S.-Mexico border. Building on Catherine Ramírez’s foundational prism of Chicanafuturism—which, in turn, builds upon Afrofuturism—Latin@futurism excavates and creatively recycles the seeming detritus of the past to imagine and galvanize more desirable presents and futures. The architecture of this pan-ethnic genre is animated by what Alicia Gaspar de Alba calls “alter-Native” knowledges and practices indigenous to the Americas, particularly by “disidentification” (Muñoz 1999) or “rasquachismo” (Ybarra-Frausto 1991); see here for a video of Tomás Ybarra-Frausto explaining rasquachismo).

These terms signal Latin@ sensibilities of “making do” and repurposing dominant forms pursuant to survival as well as cultural critique and affirmation. Since Latin@futurist texts often blend speculative genres, such as sci-fi, fantasy, horror, whereby they create new, hybrid forms reflective of cultural mestizaje or what Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos called “La Raza Cósmica.” Latin@futurism is not derivative or mimetic of dominant speculative genres, but instead insists on its own terms and conditions. To apprehend how Latin@futurism melds putative generic parameters and foments new mestiz@ aesthetics, Shelley Streeby argues, these texts should be approached through the umbrella genre of the speculative. Reminiscent of Victor Frankenstein’s monster, Latin@futurism stitches together seemingly incompatible parts, electrifying an articulate body who insistently questions mastery and social power from the dark, interminable and sometimes unintelligible margins.

In brief, this is an exciting moment in Latin@futurism, evinced in the proliferation of speculative cultural production and scholarship beginning to uncover alternative Latin@futurist genealogies and conceive new theoretical tools, critical vocabularies, and hermeneutics. In what follows, I briefly map out alter-Native imaginative worlds or “altermundos” of Latin@futurism, including a survey of its aesthetics, methodologies, and critical contexts.

Rasquache Remix

While it would be naïve to say that Latin@futurism exists independent of dominant speculative genre, it must be noted that Latin@futurism disidentifies with it, creatively recycles and repurposes it a lorasquache. Historically, the speculative genre has been inhospitable to non-white peoples—as both creators and subjects—as the speculative imaginary grew out of white European encounters with the other. Sci-fi and fantasy, for example, became central sites wherein the colonial imaginary could safely stretch its gaze, explore and bring into being its wildest fantasies as evinced in Sir Thomas Moore’s Utopia (1516) or Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) (Rieder 2008: 2). It is no accident, then, that sci-fi emerged as a cohesive genre during the height of British imperialism in the nineteenth century (Rieder 2008: 3). Moreover, early gothic horror novels such as Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto betray a fear of foreign immigrant others.

Contemporary speculative production in the U.S. and beyond, moreover, remains firmly entrenched within a largely white, middle-class, cisgender male purview. An overwhelming majority of sci-fi and fantasy films and popular novels rely on familiar colonialist, racist tropes. Catherine S. Ramírez diagnoses a “messianic white boy” complex endemic to popular film during the 1990s such as the Star Wars series. Ramírez remarks humorously—though seriously—how she believed that the genre was reserved “for immature white male nerds with dubious politics” (Ramírez 2015: 127) until she read the speculative novels of African American feminist author Octavia Butler. Charles Ramírez Berg, Adilifu Nama, and William Nericcio have similarly pointed out that people of color have been excluded from mainstream speculative film and fiction, relegated to “narrative subtext or implicit allegorical subject” (Nama 2008: 2), figured as the monstrous and alien, or completely disappeared altogether. Such erasure ironically evokes the multiple ways in which the laboring bodies of Latin@s are systematically made invisible, a conceit dramatized in the part-sci-fi, part-telenovela, part-satire 2004 film A Day Without A Mexicandirected by Sergio Arau in which Mexicans in California magically disappear into a pink fog.

But if central aspects of the speculative pivot around imaginings of the future, what do such absences index about the futurity of Latin@s? In his one-man stand-up performance in Freak (1998), directed by Spike Lee, Colombian American actor John Leguizamo remarks sardonically: “There were no Latin people on Star Trek” and continues that this elision “was proof that they weren’t planning to have us around for the future.” Leguizamo voices how the filmic and more general discursive excision of Latin@s from the future signals a deep-seated and even genocidal desire of white America to disappear Latin@s altogether. This seething desire is felt acutely as President-elect (at the time of writing) Donald Trump threatens to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and deport millions of Mexican immigrants. Indeed, Latin@ cultural producers have responded with creative forms of resistance, drawing on speculative aesthetic tactic to express the sheer absurdity and horror of Trump’s xenophobic proposals, including Ale Damiani’s sci-fi short film “M.A.M.O.N.—Latinos Vs. Trump,” featuring a murderous “Trumpbot” replete with crotch missiles aimed at helpless Mexicans or protesters holding up banners that read “Trump es Chupacabra [“goatsuker”],” comparing Trump to the folkloric vampiric creature. As well, on 20 January 2017 when Trump will assume office, queer Chican@ Richard Gamboa’s web series Brujos will air, imagines a not-so-alternative world in which white affluent male descendants of New World colonizers conduct a witch-hunt against queer and queer of color graduate students. The show allegorically dramatizes recent heightened homophobia and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Through disidentificatory speculative tactics Latin@futurism defamiliarizes dystopic realities, demands real change, and gestures toward other possible futures and ways of being. Latin@futurism insists upon our right to exist, to not only survive but also to flourish: “¡Latin@futurism ahora!” (Merla-Watson and Olguín 2017: xi).

“A Future With a Past”

Even though Latin@futurism dates back to at least the late 1960s, it is just recently that scholars have begun to study it in a focused manner. Anthologies such as Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain(2003) document an established tradition of Latin American sci-fi, and there exists a robust body of scholarship dedicated to interpreting this literature. Yet, curiously absent have been anthologies shoring up U.S. Latin@ sci-fi and attendant scholarship. However, two forthcoming publications are on the cusp of changing this status quo. The anthology Latino/a Rising edited by Matthew Goodwin, due out January 2017, coalesces for the first time U.S. Latin@ speculative fiction, showcasing its dazzling breadth and creative force. Second, our collected works Altermundos, due out March 2017, will also be the first of its kind to coalesce new scholarship dedicated to Latin@ speculative aesthetics that features new, representative speculative fiction in tandem with Latino/a Rising. These publications codify and valorize a heretofore largely unrecognized and undertheorized corpus within academia and popular culture. It is our hope, too, that our collective work issues a clarion call to scholars and the larger public to continue unearthing, theorizing, and enjoying Latin@futurism in all its profound illuminations, ranging from the horrific to the sublime.

Attending to the ethnic particularity of Latin@futurism, scholars have begun to identify alter-Native genealogies and prototypical speculative texts. In the final scene of Peruvian American Alex Rivera’s 2008 dystopian, cyberpunk sci-fi film Sleep Dealer, the main character Memo Cruz, after redeploying a U.S. drone to destroy a privatized dam withholding water from Oaxacan farmers and citizens in his hometown, rebuilds his life and future in the borderlands of Tijuana. As the film's poster makes clear (see left-hand image above), with its Gibsonian "jacking-in" of the main character, this cyberpunk text positions Memo in a near-future Mexico concerned with digital technology and corporate power. Memo reflects that it is “a future with a past,” revealing how for Latin@s and other oppressed groups more emancipatory imaginings and instantiations of the future must reckon with the past—that we do not have the privilege of choice of beginning ex nihilo, to forget. This imperative to remember voices a “prime directive,” to borrow from the Star Trek universe, for scholars of Latin@futurism to turn to the specific and unique histories and ontologies informing Latin@ speculative aesthetics. In his analysis of representations of the apocalypse in Mexican sci-fi, Samuel Manickam, for instance, suggests that while the apocalypse has been mainly defined through Eurocentric lenses, motifs of the apocalyptic in Mexican sci-fi stem from ancient Mexican indigenous ontologies. Manickam humorously observes that from the perspective of the pre-Columbian civilization of the Aztecs, “the Spaniards who rode in on strange four-legged beasts and donned seemingly unassailable shiny armor and wielded fire-throwing weapons might as well have come from another planet” (Manickam 2012: 97). Much in the same way Junot Díaz has underscored how the brutal Trujillo dictatorship could only be understood as a horrific sci-fi tale, Manickam similarly foregrounds here how conquest for indigenous peoples was experienced as otherworldly and science fictional. Manickam, in conjunction with Díaz, signals how Latin@s need only to look to our own histories and lived experiences to compose speculative worlds that perhaps ultimately are not all that strange or distant.

Exhibition of the head of Joaquin [Murrieta], the bandit who features in Valadez's PBS film

In a similar vein, scholars have begun to identify prototypical texts comprising Latin@futurist literary and aesthetic history. Notes of gothic horror resound in the nineteenth-century corrido or Mexican ballad of “Joaquin Murrieta,” based on “Mexican Robin Hood” figure who was the subject of violent racism in mid-nineteenth-century California after the Mexican American War. Purportedly, California Rangers decapitated him and stored his head in a glass jar filled with alcohol and later displayed in various mining camps for profit—a macabre tale that informs Chican@ filmmaker John Valadez’s part-fiction, part-documentary PBS film The Head of Joaquin Murrieta in which Valadez reframes the decapitation as collective historical or racial trauma still shaping the present lived experiences of Chican@s. Gothic horror pulsates in the pages of Américo Paredes’s 1955 novel The Shadow, which is set in post-revolutionary Mexico and draws on Mexican folklore to dramatize demons arising from class and racial conflict. Works such as these that mobilize gothic horror for both social critique and aesthetic pleasure set the stage for a slew of contemporary Chican@ gothic production, such as the plays of Cherríe Moraga, the novels of Marta Acosta and Manuel Muñoz, the multi-genre work of S. Joaquin Rivera, the young adult literature of David Bowles and Xavier Garza, the creepy short stories of Myriam Gurba, the dark poetry of Erika Garza-Johnson and Edward Vidaurre, the horror films of Robert Rodriguez, the haunting visual art of Alma López, or the musical performances and aesthetics of the bands Prayers and Girl in a Coma.

There are also several prototypes of Latinx sci-fi, fantasy, and cognate subgenres. Dystopian and utopian currents course through early movement texts from the late 1960s, including Rodolfo “Corkey” Gonzáles’s 1967 epic poem “I am Joaquin”/ “Yo Soy Joaquin” celebrating Chican@ identity and pride or the 1969 Chican@ manifesto Plan Espiritual de Aztlán articulating cultural nationalism and self-determination. A cyborg appears in the 1969 cyberpunk one act play Los Vendidos (“The Sellouts”), by Luis Valdez, founder of El Teatro Campesino, to embody assimilation or “selling out.” The late Chicana feminist writer, scholar, and philosopher Gloria Anzaldúa’s late 1970s short stories incorporate posthumanism and trans-speciesism to explore the intersections of sexual difference, race, and spirituality, while Oscar Zeta Ocosta’s1972 novel The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo marshals the psychedelic and fantasy to conceive cultural identity. Moreover, playwright, poet, and journalist Gregg Barrios had his Chicanx high school students perform Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars in 1976 in Crystal City, Texas—where the historic 1969 student walkouts to protest racist schools occurred—to think through the relationships between “the alien” and capitalism. Early speculative texts and performances dovetail with prototypical gothic works in paving the way for a plethora of Latinx sci-fi, fantasy, and other generic new mestiz@ hybrids. Representative works include, to name but a few, José Torres-Tama’s sci-fi, noir 2010 performance “Aliens, Immigrants, and other Evildoers”; the sci-fi, fantasy, horror hybrid novels of Ernesto “Mondo” Hogan, co-writers Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita, Rudy Ch. Garcia, and Alfredo Véa Jr.; the short stories of Lawrence La-Fountain Stokes; the post/apocalyptic performances of Adelina Anthony, Virginia Grise, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Amalia Ortiz, and José Rivera.

Traces of earlier speculative works also inhere in commercially successful popular cultural forms, ranging from the fantasy and sci-fi-inflected comic book series Love and Rockets by Los Bros Hernandez (Gilbert and Jamie) and Marvel’s new series America featuring a Puerto Rican lesbian super hero written by Gaby Rivera to the sci-fi-horror cinematic productions of Guillermo del Toro, or even Elicia Sanchez’s highly publicized “Trek-Mex” wedding. Contemporary Latin@futurism and its multitudinous genealogies, in sum, attest to how this aesthetic corpus continues to thrive, multiply, and metamorphose. It is rhizomatic, cultivated–or cruelly begotten—by particular histories and ontologies, its outgrowths connecting with eclectic, hemispheric influences.

Yet, many of these cultural texts are contingently tethered by the same Latin@ utopian anhelos or longings that sustained early Chican@ movement poetics of the 1960s, echoed in a broad spectrum of recent cultural production, ranging from queer Latin@ philosophical treatises on queer utopias to Cuban duo Gente de Zona’s (featuring Marc Anthony) song “La Gozadera” (“good time”) that imagines a global pan-Latin@ party and altermundo in which we all eat Puerto Rican arroz con habichuela and move to Afro-Caribbean beats produced the Dominican merengue bass drum in the bustling streets of Cuba. Interconnecting the diverse altermundos of Latin@futurism are aesthetic movements toward the future steered by reckonings with the past and present. Inspired by altermondialism and Chican@ feminist and queer of color theory, altermundo indexes third space visions grounded in concrete realities while gazing toward the decolonial and utopian” (Merla-Watson 2017: 242). These utopian visions are heterogeneous and dissensual, bespeaking the actual pluriversality comprising Latin@ identity and our shared alter-Native futures. c/s

Dr. Cathryn J. Merla-Watson is an Assistant Professor in the Literatures and Cultural Studies Department and affiliate faculty in Women and Gender Studies as well as Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas, Río Grande Valley. Currently, Dr. Merla-Watson is completing a book examining how queer, trans-American Latinx performances enact affective politics through re-imagining the gothic and the post/apocalyptic.

]]>https://www.alluvium-journal.org/2017/03/15/the-altermundos-of-latinfuturism/feed/07845Jordan Krall’s Speculative Fictionhttps://www.alluvium-journal.org/2017/03/15/jordan-kralls-speculative-fiction/
https://www.alluvium-journal.org/2017/03/15/jordan-kralls-speculative-fiction/#respondWed, 15 Mar 2017 16:45:55 +0000https://www.alluvium-journal.org/?p=7863Speculative fiction is a paradox. Synonymous with science fiction and “genre literature,” it is also one of the most ancient modes of storytelling in literary history. One could easily identify Plato’s Atlantis...
]]>Sébastien Doubinsky

Speculative fiction is a paradox. Synonymous with science fiction and “genre literature,” it is also one of the most ancient modes of storytelling in literary history. One could easily identify Plato’s Atlantis, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and the whole Arthurian cycle within the sub-genre of speculative fiction, as well as George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World(1932). There is a distinct speculative thread throughout literary narrative that can be traced from the origins of writing until the present day. The reason for this is that definitions of the speculative are extremely vague, as one glimpse on the web shows us: “A broad literary genre encompassing any fiction with supernatural, fantastical, or futuristic elements”. I will, however, try to frame the field of speculative fiction I will be dealing with in this article by restricting my focus to what is usually called dystopian literature. Dystopia is critically defined as the opposite of utopia: that is to say, a fiction set in a negative vision of society (such as the aforementioned Orwell’s 1984) instead of presenting an ideal possibility (such as More’s Utopia). However, the usual scholarly usage of the term “dystopia” becomes problematic when considered in relation to the works I will present and analyse here, since most of them do not deal with the future, but rather present their readers with a deconstructed version of “today,” or even “yesterday.”

Science fiction dystopia presenting a negative view on society and present day issues

This type of dystopian literature, which deals with alternative speculative pasts or presents rather than extrapolated futures, is not new. We could cite Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita (1966), Franz Kafka’s TheCastle(1926), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5(1969), or Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) as good examples of this branch of speculative fiction. What these works have in common are their historical settings and, in a broad sense, their political critique of their respective contemporary socio-political moments. The Master and Margarita takes place during the 1917 Russian revolution, Slaughterhouse 5 during the Second World War, and White Noise in Reagan’s 80s. And although not set in any particular place or time, Kafka’s TheCastle is considered an attack on bureaucracy and power. These works are thus all engagés – politically engaged – and echo the worries and injustices of their time, reflecting unique historical situations.

At first glance, Jordan Krall’s False Magic Kingdom Cycle (2012) and Your Cities, Your Tombs (2013) do belong to this tradition. Krall is known for his non-genre texts – spanning horror, crime, Weird fiction, bizarre and apocalyptic narratives – and these two volumes are set around the historical event of 9/11, with a collection of characters and narrators that are directly or indirectly involved with the destruction of the Twin Towers. As with William S. Burroughs’ novel The Ticket That Exploded (1962) or J. G. Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition (1970), the plot in Krall’s fictions is almost impossible to describe. It revolves around a general fascination with high buildings and destruction, a secret society of three “doctors” conspiring to destroy the world using drugs, weird medical experiments and Japanese snuff movies for children, and characters becoming more and more alienated in their work and family life. The narration is fragmented in non sequiturelements and the narrators’ identities seem to be interchangeable. However, far from being yet another attempt at reworking Burroughs, the False Magic Kingdom Cycle and Your Cities, Your Tombs both offer their own particular narrative statements and, taken together, can be read as enacting a decisive shift in the paradigm of speculative fiction. In acknowledging his literary influences (Burroughs, Ballard, Barry N. Malzberg and John Crowley are all mentioned in Krall’s novels, and Krall cites Thomas Ligotti in some interviews), Krall places himself in a long tradition of literary speculative fiction. However, in so doing he also consciously sets the reader in a paradoxical trap. On the one hand, readers familiar with the writers he references will expect a particular kind of landscape and narrative texture; whilst, on the other hand, Krall can then manipulate this familiarity to redefine a new fictional universe, pushing the generic form of speculative fiction to its limits.

Art installation The Tribute in Light sees vertical light columns mark the site of the World Trade Centers destroyed on September 11, 2001

One of the most unsettling elements in Krall’s work is his choice of 9/11 as a setting for his speculative fiction. As I have already mentioned, speculative fiction usually deals with either an alternate contemporary time or a possible extrapolated future, and rather more seldomly with an alternative historical past. In choosing the 9/11 terrorist attacks as the recent historical past in which to set his speculative narratives, therefore, Krall is doing something rather unusual. Unlike the speculative futures of Morris’ News From Nowhere(1890) or H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895), or even the alternative geographical present discovered in More’s Utopian island, the events of 9/11 did of course take place and the destruction of the Twin Towers is a globally documented event. What has to be immediately noted, though, is that 9/11 is only directly mentioned once, in the title of one of the short stories composing The False Magic Kingdom Cycle: “Sodomy In Nine Eleven Land”. However, there are descriptions that do not leave any doubt that the attacks on the WTO’s Twin Towers are being depicted in the narrative:

Billy stands up, looks around, and sees he is standing in the shadow of a huge tower. While staring up at it, he walks down the alley and out onto the sidewalk. He notices there isn’t just one huge tower above him but two. They are shiny and majestic, like two giant shimmering idols reaching out for the sky, reaching up high as if to show its superiority over the surrounding buildings. […] Again he looks up at the towers.

His awe quickly turns to terror. (Krall 2014: 184-5)

The traumatic event of 9/11 is the center of gravity in both novels, the vortex that overdetermines all meaning. But what exactly is Krall’s meaning here? This is the question at the center of Krall’s fiction. The False Magic Kingdom Cycle is presented as a prequel to Your Cities, Your Tombs. A collection of short texts and cryptic illustrations, it introduces most of the characters present in Krall’s subsequent book, Your Cities, Your Tombs, and depicts narrative events that take place shortly before the events described in the latter text. It is, however, as difficult to understand and resistant to narrative interpretation as its successor. We might speculate, then, that Krall’s decision to depict the event of 9/11 in an alternate speculative past hasn’t actually destroyed meaning per se, but that in this remediation, 9/11 signifies the culmination of lost meaning.

This detail is essential in the paradigmatic shift of speculative fiction as undertaken by Krall. If classical political speculative fiction, such as Zamyatin’s We(1924), Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World, concerned itself with futuristic projections of dystopian society, Krall turns his narrative gaze towards the past. Interestingly, this is not the mythical past we find, for example, in Plato’s depiction of Atlantis in dialogues such as Timaeus and Critias, but, rather, a real event in recent history. We are not confronted with an alternate reality of our future, but with the contemporary moment, through the “zero instant” of early 21st-century history. In this speculative reworking of the recent contemporary past, Krall distinguishes himself from the speculative projects of writers such as Burroughs or Ballard, whose genre narratives are considered historically continuous and coherent with the present in which they are written. The colliding worlds of Burroughs’ Western Lands(1987) or Ballard’s alienated universe of The Atrocity Exhibition or even Crash (1973) are not spontaneously generated in the manner of the nightmarish environment of Krall’s fiction. They are texts that portray processes and evolutions, whereas Krall’s catastrophe might be considered closer to the occult notion of the égrégore, that is, a spiritual being created by a mass of believers. The many references in these two texts to the Apocalypse – in particular to the enemy nations of Gog and Magog cited in the Bible’s Book of Ezekiel – and the Gnostic presence of a possibly “evil God,” encourage Krall’s readers tend towards a more occult and Weird reading of history. In these works, 9/11 is reformulated into the culmination of both conscious and unconscious imaginary desires, instead of functioning in each text as a purely historical phenomenon.

As Jacques Derrida notes in 'On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy', the term apocalypse signifies an unveiling – a revelation.

Of particular note is Krall’s representation of architecture in The False Magic Kingdom Cycle and Your Cities, Your Tombs as an oppressive presence in each novel. By using architecture to focus his narration, as well as references to, and depictions of various media (including videos, sound, and xeroxed and altered images), Krall’s speculative works lend themselves to a Debordian reading. The Situationist Guy Debord famously developed a theory of “psychogeography” in works such as La Société du Spectacle [The Society of the Spectacle] published in 1967. For Debord, the urban landscape affects our ways of inhabiting space, and as a consequence, limits our freedom of movement, which is freedom itself. For Debord, architecture functions, in a Foucauldian fashion, as a “dispositif” (or device) of control (Foucault 2002). In the same way, social space has been filled with images (what Jean Baudrillard will call later “Eidolôns” – idols or simulacra [1994]) that replace the objects (whether real objects or concepts) they had originally been designed to represent. Thus, the image comes to be considered by consumer-subjects as the “real,” and through this confusion the capitalist order maintains itself by posing the illusion of democracy. Debord’s analysis of the spectacle thus opens up a productive reading of Krall’s fiction, when we consider the role that architecture plays:

The streets, of course, are unsafe. Once someone is in the city, they are at the mercy of a cluster of tall monoliths that symbolize nothing but man’s loosening grip on reality. They symbolize the insane death throes of desperate species. (Krall 2014: 210)

Dr. Visna gets up, puts in a video tape into the VCR. He presses PLAY. The doctors type while watching the footage. Grey plumes with ash with skin cells and copier paper, coffee cups, paperclips, staplers and Scotch tape, liquid paper fireworks, fluttering manilla folders as deathbirds. A blue sky transforming into a face that is beaten with righteous agony. Explosions ripping apart temples and trains.

As we have come to learn from Debord’s analysis of mid-twentieth-century capitalism, the spectacle and its architecture are the basis of our alienation in Krall’s works. However, contrary to the role of architecture in Burroughs’ texts, here there is no possible escape. If Burroughs saw language as a “virus” created by the Venusians to control us in texts like Nova Express(1964), then it was still possible to resist this linguistic virus by destroying language and coherent syntax through using the cut-up technique. But although Krall uses more or less the same cut-up technique in various chapters, there is no escape in sight. We remain caught in language, as one of the characters, a nameless writer who foresees 9/11 in his novel, realizes: “The television is on. Indeed, something has happened. I cannot believe my eyes. It’s just like in my book. It’s terrifyingly magnificent. It’s all I imagined and more” (Krall 2013: 198). Language, here, is overtaken by reality. The character’s reference to “… and more” resonates like both a victory and a defeat of fiction’s ability to represent social experience, as well as an admittance of complicity. 9/11 is the consequence of everybody’s apocalyptic desire in the world of these texts. Krall’s writer is indeed a direct/indirect accomplice of the catastrophe. He admits it. He accepts it. As readers, therefore, we are all part of Krall’s Debordian Spectacle, and the apocalypse is our own wish. One of the three homicidal doctors’ names (or pseudonyms, we will never know) is Dr. Sotos, which, of course, is a direct reference to the controversial writer Peter Sotos – offering Krall’s reader a mise-en-abyme within the mise-en-abyme. Fiction cannot save us. It can only reveal and make us participate.

In this, Krall joins Thomas Ligotti’s pessimism, who claims that “evil” and suffering are inherent to the human condition, and that fiction should mirror this:

Evil can be quite entertaining when presented in artistic forms and, paradoxically, distracts us from itself so that we hardly need to think of it at all. Nevertheless, while most people require this distraction most of the time, ultimately they insist that there is not so much evil – so much fear, suffering and strangeness in the world – that being alive is all right, at least on the whole. There are always some people, though, who cannot tolerate evil, even in the smallest amount. This means that they cannot tolerate life, if only in principle, and cannot voice their approval of it. (Ligotti 2016: n. pag.)

Krall’s speculative fiction might productively be read, therefore, as conveying an alienated world that presents an intricate part of Debord’s Spectacle, whilst simultaneously denouncing it from the inside. In The False Magic Kingdom Cycle and Your Cities, Your Tombs, 9/11 represents a true apocalypse in the etymological meaning of the word, which is a “revelation”: combining all elements of time, but paradoxically excluding the future. It is a reversed eschatology, caught in an infinite loop. All meaning collapses with the Twin Towers but the catastrophe is also provoked, in the first place, by a collapse of meaning itself. The speculative trope of temporality collapses as “then” and “now” are both disunited and perpetually recombined, replacing the trope of the extrapolated future as traditionally conceived in dystopian literature. Krall’s speculation is not about what could happen, but, rather, concerns itself with what has really happened, and this opens up a new edge in contemporary speculative fiction. Meaning, like God or a recurrent father figure looming over every character in the novel, cannot be found. We only have fragments of possibilities of meaning, which we, as readers, are desperately trying to piece together. Fiction becomes a metaphor of itself, a monstrous ouroboros that keeps eating its own tail, and us with it. As one of Krall’s characters keeps saying: “Everything is dangerous all the time.”

Dr Sébastien Doubinsky is associate professor in the French section of the university of Aarhus, Denmark. His research fields cover translation, comparative studies and work reading theory. He co-authored Reading Literature Today with Tabish Khair, published by SAGE in 2011. He is also a bilingual novelist and poet.

]]>https://www.alluvium-journal.org/2017/03/15/jordan-kralls-speculative-fiction/feed/07863Martin MacInnes and Celtic SFhttps://www.alluvium-journal.org/2017/03/15/martin-macinnes-infinite-ground-and-celtic-science-fiction/
https://www.alluvium-journal.org/2017/03/15/martin-macinnes-infinite-ground-and-celtic-science-fiction/#respondWed, 15 Mar 2017 16:45:07 +0000https://www.alluvium-journal.org/?p=7819Martin MacInnes’ debut novel Infinite Ground(2016) is structured around a disarmingly simple premise. At the height of a heatwave in a South American country, a 29-year-old man named Carlos is having...
]]>Martyn Colebrook

Martin MacInnes’ debut novel Infinite Ground(2016) is structured around a disarmingly simple premise. At the height of a heatwave in a South American country, a 29-year-old man named Carlos is having a reunion dinner with his family at a restaurant, La Cueva. Carlos leaves the table, goes to the bathroom but does not return. As the narrator details: “Carlos had gone to the bathroom,” he writes, “and then to all intents and purposes he had stopped existing.” After his family report him missing, an unnamed inspector, a widower who is moving closer to his impending retirement, is assigned to the case and sets about trying to track down Carlos. His modus operandi includes a series of interviews with colleagues and family, and the use of reconstructions at potential crime scenes including his workplace.

Crime scenes and unsolved crimes as a feature in Scottish crime fiction

Ostensibly, the deployment of a missing person and an unsolved crime firmly locates the novel in the genre of Scottish crime fiction – MacInnes was born in Inverness and now resides in Edinburgh – but on the surface this is as far from a Tartan Noir potboiler as one could possibly imagine. There is no existential patrolling of the Scottish “Central Belt” and the Celtic postindustrial spaces of MacInnes’ home country are replaced by a “sweltering metropolis surrounded by dense tropical rainforest” (Cox 2016: n. pag.). Indeed, the novel consciously traverses many of the policed zones of popular genres including Borgesian fantasy, Marquezian Magical Realism, not to mention the work of Angela Carter, Cesar Aira and Franz Kafka, and these contribute to its imaginatively rich textual engagement. Despite these transnational generic influences, I would also contend that there is a strong element of Scottish fantasy and science fiction within Infinite Ground and this article will consider how Celtic SF/F functions in the novel.

When we consider the proverbial Highlanders of contemporary Scottish science-fantasy and its lineage, notable names that emerge include Alasdair Gray, Iain (M.) Banks, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Whilst drawing on a significant spectrum of other influences, this particular triumvirate’s shadow appears to have been adumbrated in MacInnes’ Infinite Ground. The novel’s position within the Celtic tradition is, interestingly, established in the first half of the narrative before it descents into a disorienting climactic voyage into territory the reader would better associate with “the best bits of Paul Kingsnorth’s intense interior monologue Beast filtered through Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” (Cox 2016: np). We can identify the first self-reflexive reference to genre and MacInnes’ literary precursors in the line: “Why should I be disgusted by the mass that came out of the cockroach” (MacInnes 2016: x). As the text indicates, this image is taken from The Passion According to GH (1964) – a novel by the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, which is written in the form of a monologue that addresses an existential crisis over the accidental crushing of a cockroach. The reference is evident and “the link back to Kafka is more than entomological” (Docx 2016: n. pag.). That is to say, it foregrounds a topic that is foremost among those that MacInnes discusses: the fragmented nature of human consciousness and the perception and construction of reality itself. As “ ‘Suspicion, Rumour, Link’ No 5” warns, the entire investigation could feasibly be “an indulgent and morbid fantasy created by a man in middle age in grief for his dead wife.” As Roger Docx suggests, “another way to read this book is [as] a meditation on the nature of the human psyche under the intense pressure of loss and isolation” (Docx 2016: n. pag.).

The novel’s formal narrative begins:

He got the call in the middle of the night, for some reason. His help would be appreciated going over a case. How recent was unusual – the man had been gone only three weeks. He was to put everything aside and concentrate, for a spell, exclusively on this. Resources would be made available. He would be given all the support they could provide. (MacInnes 2016: 3)

The use of the specific narrative perspective, in this case the third person singular, is familiar territory for those well versed in Scottish fiction, and particularly Scottish crime fiction. William McIlvanney and Iain Banks used the second person singular inLaidlaw (1977) and Complicity (1993) respectively, immediately placing the reader on the back foot by forcing them to “see” narrative events through the narrator’s eyes. MacInnes intensifies the reader’s intentional dislocation from his subject, refusing to permit us to understand the inspector from a human perspective. The use of “he” disarms the reader, intensifying the curiosity about the circumstances surrounding the phone call. As Infinite Ground plays out, the intensity of the investigation is reflected in the novel’s surroundings (both physical and psychological). Through setting, MacInnes offers a claustrophobic examination of the individual who is subjected to regulations and barriers, both internal and external, which are invisible and rooted in the bureaucratic systems that underpin the world with which the investigator must engage.

The missing man worked for The Corporation, an entity that remains nameless due to the number of times it has changed function and location:

Such was the protracted nature of merger negotiations, the corporation Carlos worked for had been nameless for years. The inspector believed this was deliberate, designed to exploit loopholes, circumvent various responsibilities. The corporation’s legal team as well as its administrators, its marketing department, and its front desk staff, had to adapt to their language to account for the fact the body they worked for had no name. (MacInnes 2016: 13)

MacInnes brings us to the territory of Iain Banks and Alasdair Gray with this construction. Banks’ The Bridge (1986) focuses on the life of John Orr, a resident of “The Bridge,” a dystopian entity which may or may not be the product of the coma-induced mind of Alex Lennox who is in hospital following a car accident. The motif of the mind as an underpinning structure is recurrent in Infinite Ground, where the inspector is confronted by the puzzle that “[t]he microbes, in some sense, activate change in his thoughts. Think of it like a factory producing the elements of feeling – chemistry” (MacInnes 2016: 47). This concurs with Banks’ use of the body and the mind as a motif for the dystopian structure of “the Bridge.” In Banks’ 1986 novel, the Bridge’s rules are largely unwritten and predicated on knowing and understanding erudite traditions that are never fully explained. Orr suffers demotion, social conflict, and continually struggles to learn the languages spoken on “the Bridge,” thus he is rendered alien and alienated amongst his peers. It is significant that MacInnes’ corporation is focused on “loopholes,” “marketing” and “language” since it is the element which informs the remainder. “Language” in Infinite Ground forms a fundamental barrier to both the investigation and the conclusion. As the inspector notes: “[H]e could estimate how much language had been made in the room. It was intuitive, but he tended to be right. A room would be more hectic after language” (MacInnes 2016: 37). Ignoring that this type of linguistic formation is in the territory of Don DeLillo, the notion that language can be constructed in the room infers a business-like principle in which the corporation imposes its own idiolect upon the world around it, in order to control, deflect, inform, or dictate the narrative that follows.

The antecedents of The Bridge lie in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark: A Life in 4 Books (1981): a novel in which we are also presented with a narrative that engages at an ecological and dystopian level with societal spaces and structures in which bureaucratic rules and nameless (or the unnamed) organisations dominate the lives of those subjected to their structures. Gray’s subject, Lanark, arrives in Unthank, a disorienting Glasgow-like city, in which there is an absence of daylight and whose residents suffer from physically disfiguring diseases with orifices growing on their limbs and body heat fading away. Lanark begins to engage with a group of younger people he cannot completely relate to and develops a skin condition called dragonhide, a disease that turns his skin into scales as an external manifestation of his emotional repression. Similarly in MacInnes’ Infinite Ground, part of the investigator’s process is to analyse Carlos’ workplace and engage the professional expertise of a forensic psychologist in order to solve the crime (arguably, the same can be said of the critic who engages their own forensic analysis of the text in order to piece together the body of work which underpins and influences).

The forensic analyst reveals that Carlos was “not held together well, and I’m not just talking about skin. The communities living there indicate an inflamed gut, and the presence of certain other organisms” (MacInnes 2016: 46). In contextualising MacInnes’ description, I am drawn here to several references in Scottish fiction – Cairns Craig identifies the motif of the parasitic organism in Lanark, and Irvine Welsh’s Filth (1999) uses the presence of a tapeworm as a second narrator to inform and reinforce the words of Bruce Robertson, Edinburgh copper, misogynist and bigot.

As the inspector follows the forensic analysis he realises “he could see the parallels between the wall-like organs of his [Carlos’] body and the places where he lived. Their analysis of the empty office was the ultimate intrusion: it was as if Carlos had seen it coming all along” (MacInnes 2016: 81). Later, the reader encounters a case where a man leaves his wife and family and is later tracked to a neighbouring village where he has constructed an almost exact wife and family in the same home. The pervasive sense of the unheimlich and the double inform this scenario whereby the individual replicates their self, albeit with the uncanny sense that there are slight differences between the self and the simulacra.

MacInnes disclosed to Robert Strachan that:

being uninterested in verisimilitude or feeling himself incapable of writing psychologically rounded characters meant he had to find his own techniques to convey the ideas he was interested in. […] He uses the rough scaffolding of the narrative to turn his gaze deeply inwards, to ignore the psychological development of character that the 19th century realist novel has trained us to believe is the pinnacle of literary art and to focus on the material development of character instead. (Strachan 2016: n. pag.)

To this effect, MacInnes uses an ecological or environmental imperative in his narrative, exploring the manner in which the physical body of the missing person interacts with and responds to the external ecosystem in which it is immersed and the pressures to which it is subjected. It significant that the critic refers to the “material development,” whether this is a conscious pun or an allusion to the underpinning motifs of MacInnes’ novel can be debated. Given that the “material depreciation” of Carlos’ body becomes such a focal point for the inspector’s investigation, it could be argued that the motif of the body in decay and the process of piecing together forensic analysis through the clues left from the remnants of Carlos’ body are broader metaphors for authorial strategies which inform MacInnes’ work.

We could locate this early critical reception of MacInnes’ work within a rather broader analysis that would include the work of James Kelman and, particularly, the trauma which functions at the heart of a novel such as How Late it Was How Late (1994). Here, the actions of Kelman’s protagonist Sammy (Samsa) Samuels are interwoven with the bureaucratic power structures he encounters and which restrict and nullify him. Given the tentacular sprawling of generic echoes and allusions in MacInnes’ Infinite Ground, such an approach may, via notions of parasitic exchange, be welcomed if not necessary.

Dr Martyn James Colebrook is an independent researcher. He completed a PhD focusing on the novels of Iain (M.) Banks and co-edited the first collection of scholarly essays, The Transgressive Iain Banks with Katharine Cox (McFarland 2013). He has published individually and collaboratively within the field of twentieth century fiction with chapters including “Contemporary Scottish Crime Fiction and Terrorism”, “The Wasp Factory, the Gothic and Mental Disorder”, “Paul Auster and Alienation”, “China Mieville and H.P. Lovecraft”, “Iain (M.) Banks and John Fowles”, and “Gordon Burn, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son and the Yorkshire Ripper".

]]>https://www.alluvium-journal.org/2017/03/15/martin-macinnes-infinite-ground-and-celtic-science-fiction/feed/07819Speculative Resistance in Lost Girlshttps://www.alluvium-journal.org/2017/03/15/alan-underground-speculative-resistance-in-lost-girls/
https://www.alluvium-journal.org/2017/03/15/alan-underground-speculative-resistance-in-lost-girls/#respondWed, 15 Mar 2017 16:04:11 +0000https://www.alluvium-journal.org/?p=7910This article will suggest that Alan Moore’s perspective can usefully be considered as part of an underground aesthetic which declares the necessity of solidarity of experience with all other groups...
]]>Mark P. Williams

This article will suggest that Alan Moore’s perspective can usefully be considered as part of an underground aesthetic which declares the necessity of solidarity of experience with all other groups through artistic expression. I would like to consider Moore’s earlier epic poem The Mirror of Love(2004) as a pre-text for his more recently completed underground comix project Lost Girls(2006) and, in so doing, situate Lost Girls as a speculative underground comix narrative. Like Moore’s earlier work, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen(1999-), Lost Girls is what we can call a “counterfiction” (Hills 2003): that is, a text that presents a crossover between well-loved fictional characters, which necessarily always has a radical potential (see my discussion of the radical potential of crossovers, "Rise of the Irregulars"). The characters appropriated into the world of Moore and Gebbie’s Lost Girls, include:Wendy from Peter Pan, Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, and Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass. In Lost Girls, these canonical protagonists from children’s literature meet as adults in a hotel in Switzerland shortly before the outbreak of WWI to share stories of their respective sexual awakenings. This takes the form that Moore and Gebbie have polemically categorised as pornography, which has itself created some controversy.

Sexual awakenings celebrated and explored in modern works mark a concentrated move away from prudery

Produced over many years, the different chapters of Lost Girls present the reader with both a defence of pornography, understood as a genre of human fantasy, and also a text that transforms pornography into another form of Art. In the processLost Girls works through a catalogue of representations of sexuality, from subconscious desire through to bedroom farce. Moore says of the lengthy discussions between himself and Melinda Gebbie, which underpin every panel of the comic, that: “[w]e’ve had sixteen years to think about all the moral ramifications of LostGirls, whereas most of our opponents are liable to be a wee-bit rabid and not thinking about the things they say before they say them” (Moore qtd in Gravett 2008: n. pag.). As such the arguments of the text must be read as progressing historically and personally in the same way the stories of the individual characters develop. For this reason, I would like to suggest that the pre-text to Lost Girls – Moore’s poem The Mirror of Love – is particularly relevant to situating Lost Girls, both in terms of its closeness to themes explored in the later text, as well as the milieu in which both texts emerge. Lost Girls sees Moore and Gebbie taking up the concept of the “moral pornographer” from Angela Carter’s 1978 polemical work TheSadeian Woman. This is made explicit by Moore in an interview with Paul Gravett:

Paul Gravett: In The Sadeian Woman Angela Carter saw the potential, and the need, for ‘enriching pornography,’ not two words you normally associate with each other. What are your thoughts on the role and potential of porn?

Alan Moore: Angela Carter’s book did give us some formative thoughts on the matter. She ended the book by suggesting that even though most pornography was disappointing, if not offensive, she could imagine a form of pornography that would be healthy in a cultural sense and enriching and do all of the things that art was capable of doing but in a pornographic context. Simone de Beauvoir in Must We Burn De Sade? makes a similar argument and I believe even Andrea Dworkin, before she died, had at least accepted the hypothetical possibility of a form of pornography that she would see as benevolent. (Gravett 2008: n. pag.)

Moore’s stated intentions are complex here and certainly leave open a lot of territory for dispute and debate. However, they offer a useful insight into something that is plainly in evidence throughout the narrative of Lost Girls: a desire to offer sexual exploration, rather than sexual exploitation, as a positive creative act on the part of the text’s protagonists. In this sense, we might read Lost Girls as a positive reworking of the kind of historical energies that, in parallel works such as From Hell (1989-96), can only be imagined destructively. In turn, the publication and export of the text itself has resulted in a swathe of challenges to legal definitions of pornography in the US, Canada, France and the UK. In situating the adventures of Alice, Wendy and Dorothy within an erotogenic paradigm, Moore and Gebbie present a world of constant historical change, already bursting with energies and movements of people and ideologies. As we can see from the panel below, Chapter 5 (“Straight On 'Til Morning”) is a good example of Melinda Gebbie’s bold use of colour to juxtapose Wendy Darling’s bath (inspired by her erotic fantasy) with her husband Harold’s own pornographic dream. The scene of Harold sleeping is rendered in muted colours with an animated materialisation of his sex-dream enacted by two primitively conveyed figures in green, purple and black, whilst Wendy’s experience of masturbating in the bath brings her own dream to vivid life (Moore and Gebbie 2006: 6). This is a narrative world in flux, which has the potential to be both benign and malign and is constantly hovering between the two. The historical events of the build-up to the First World War appear as a counternarrative behind the sensual unfolding and sexual maturation of the three women. The women’s erotic unfolding is intimately followed and matched by the shifts of rhetoric and the imagery with which their personal histories and fantasies are expressed visually; which is then contrasted with the visual narrative of the text’s portrayal of history.

Lost Girls forces its reader to address the concept of pornography, asking how pornography can be read in scholarly terms (Moore and Gebbie 2006: 6)

[Image used under fair dealings provisions]

The journal ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studieshas conducted a critical roundtable on Lost Girls which makes an essential counterpoint to Moore and Gebbie’s project called “ImageSexT: A Roundtable on Lost Girls: Down the Rabbit Hole.” This scholarly discussion offers a useful overview of the way in which Lost Girls forces its reader to address the concept of pornography reflexively and includes critical discussions and polemical assertions about how pornography can be read in scholarly and critical terms. Because of the pornographic visual narrative of Lost Girls, many reviewers focus on the aspects of this text which problematise the position of the reader as a consumer of pornography. In her essay “History, Pornography and Lost Girls,” Meredith Collins (2007) focuses instead on the aspects of the text which problematise the notion of pornography as a historical category in terms of the eccentricities of the characters:

Curious behavior in this text often seems to be a Freudian symptom of unresolved emotional repercussions from negative sexual situations. This is a highly unusual move within pornography. Instead of giving us a wholly sexual and idealized world, Gebbie and Moore confront us with a complex but thoroughly sexual world in which sexual acts have the power to affect the lives of participants and others. It is crucial not only that sex can hurt or heal, but also that these characters are more than appropriately-orificed mannequins, and that their pornographic world is more unusual for their ability to experience hurt and healing. (Collins, 2007: n. pag.)

Collins does, however, take the view that certain key moments of resolution in the text are relatively poorly handled in terms of their implications about the understanding of sexuality. She finds too much insistence on sex’s healing power and is troubled by Alice, a character who is presented as being staunchly lesbian throughout the majority of the narrative, but then who decides near the conclusion of Lost Girls to experiment with the male hotel owner. In response to this reading, Chris Eklund re-contextualises these sequences of the text in terms of Moore’s relationship with magick, drawing on Eklund’s own experience as a practising magician. He considers the text through the framework of a conception of “working,” which he describes in similar terms to the invocations that Moore gives in his live performances or which suffuse his comic series Promethea (1999-2005). When he describes this, in his title, as “A Magical Realism of the Fuck,” Eklund is referring to the idea of a magician negotiating with the tropes of realism:

As a magician, Moore knows the power of taboo – and of taboo breaking. Moore and Gebbie break certain taboos, and draw the lines of others, in the name of sex as a healthy, healing practice. The mutual ‘want to’ acts as a magical law, similar to Aleister Crowley’s ‘do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’ and even nearer to the Wiccan adaptation thereof: ‘An it harm none, do what thou wilt.’ [….] In Lost Girls, bisexuality of some degree is the norm among men and women: in accordance to the magical law, it must be for anyone capable of desiring members of both sexes. (Eklund, 2007: n. pag.)

The jouissance of the three characters in Lost Girls thus gives way to the ominous scenes of soldiery cutting across Europe during the First World War. In juxtaposing the war’s evolving trench-lines with the flowerings of Dorothy, Alice and Wendy’s sexual awakening, Moore and Gebbie’s narrative unfolds with apparent inevitability into the bloody blossoms of men dying by the millions in fields ploughed into mud by explosives.

I’d like to turn now to The Mirror of Love as a necessary pre-text for reading Lost Girls. The epic poem was originally conceived to defy the Thatcherite legislature against the so-called “promotion” of homosexuality: the infamous Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 (see also the BBC Archive). Moore’s response to the enactment of this legislation was to form a publishing company called Mad Love with his then wife Phyllis and their mutual lover, Deborah Delano, in order to publish the AARGH! (Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia!)Anthology (1988), which gained support from a diverse range of illustrators and writers opposed to political censorship and the proscription of sexuality. Moore’s own contribution was a song in praise of homosexual and homosocial culture throughout history from the images of Sappho and Spartan battle brothers to the Templars and onward through the renaissance, to the (then) current (1980s) British political landscape.

In The Mirror of Love, Moore describes a world of sexuality-as-enjoyment, from the primordial to the modern and from the “animal kingdom” to the hosts of human societies. His invocation of “Blind desire” as the motor of evolution as “life’s glorious engine” presents primordiality as joyous sexuality “churning in the mud” (Moore 2004: 2), this foreshadows his conclusions in Promethea and Lost Girls that the most important forms of contact for all species are the most immediate affirmations of life. From the moment of making explicit the connection between sex and evolution, the remainder of The Mirror of Love is haunted by the spectre of death and the delegitimisation of memory, in an enforced mode of forgetting.

Moore is effectively writing a speculative utopian history, drawing together already marginal threads into narrative continuity; a unified field he had been unable to find in the history books he consulted in the writing of the piece. In the manner of those he is opposing, Moore uses the “law” of “nature” as a first reference point:

On land,

the first societies,

great herds of she-beasts,

raised their young together,

without males

[….]

The women licked

and groomed each other

with men watching,

circling, circling round (Moore 2004: 4)

Refusing the simplistic division between “nature” and “society,” Moore’s genesis, his beginning, is “three million years of motherhood” where gender distinctions are rendered immaterial beside familial affection (Moore 2004: 4). Moore follows Foucault’s (1998) analysis of the Greco-Roman ethics of homosexual/homosocial relations, seeing an anxious regulation guarding certain paranoias about power within sexual relations. Moore is thus presenting historicised thumbnail sketches of problematic sexual regulation without ideal or idyll as a long, irregular history where sex is a consistently political and politicised problem. Hence, the Spartans’ soldierly love is presented as an idiosyncrasy, but nevertheless an effectively destructive one. Moore’s blank ironic tone in the verse of The Mirror of Love suggests that this may be a deliberate removal of homosexuality to a plane on which it can be scapegoated by the rest of society. Thus, by enforcing its practice only in soldiers “who’d defend// their frontline lovers // to the death” (Moore 2004: 14), homosexuality in The Mirror of Love also foreshadows the later verses on twentieth-century violence against LGBTQ people.

Moore focuses on the resistance to such attitudes linking it to the growth of cities and civilizations where “Dignity marched // abreast with shame” (Moore 2004: 52) and love survived even in “reeking lavatories” (Moore 2004: 52). He draws onward to the upheavals of the First World War and the central warning of The Mirror of Love: against creating more of that “loam where // fascist flowers // thrived horribly” (Moore 2004: 56). In José Villarubia’s edition the verse describing the whispered rumours of “The showers” (Moore 2004: 58) faces a completely black photograph. The idea of lost hope resonates precisely with the story of Valerie in V for Vendetta (1988-9) in a horribly precise and apposite echo of George Orwell’s 1984(1949). The page following this all-effacing blackness stands opposite a photograph of a young man raising a flame in darkness, and reads:

Darling, do not weep.

‘Twas just a dream,

a nightmare gathered on the century’s brow,

and if it comes again

I’ll hold you tight ‘til dawn,

as well I know how. (Moore 2004: 60)

Having plumbed the horror of destruction, the poem reaches out again for human-to-human communication, which is exactly what Moore continues to examine, with Gebbie, in the significantly larger project of Lost Girls. Moore extends his assertion of the value of communication using a pornographic graphic narrative because he asserts it is something that can bridge the gap between the tender and the sordid in representation; which is arguably the space where examinations of sexuality must go because expressions of sexuality do manifest in the greys and browns of deprivation as well as more colourful, enlivening shades. Moore and Gebbie are offering Lost Girls as an affirmation of the complexity of a genre regarded as mythically simple, reducible, to paraphrase Carter in The Sadeian Woman, to binaries of ones and zeroes, of male and female sex organs. If it is seen as a fantasy genre – like others they have worked on in “mainstream” comic books and underground comix – Lost Girls becomes something that can be repurposed to multifarious uses of varying sophistication; it can be seen as something potentially communicative and responsive. There is always more to be said, and Lost Girls remains controversial for other reasons unexplored here, but as a piece of speculative fiction written within an underground comix perspective on the representation of sex and sexuality it has a logical continuity with Moore’s other assertions that Art should be understood as an intervention between people.

Whatever else we need from our underground comix, we need them to test our verbal and visual capacities to respond critically to the “overground,” the dominant culture, and to affirm difference, divergence, and dissent as an affirmation of life and human contact.

Dr Mark P. Williams is currently a Teaching Fellow at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany, where he has worked since 2014. He previously taught at the University of East Anglia (UK) and Victoria University of Wellington (Aotearoa New Zealand), and has also been a political reporter for Scoop Independent Media in the NZ Parliamentary Press Gallery. His PhD, Radical Fantasy: A Study of Left Radical Politics in the Fantasy Writing of Michael Moorcock, Angela Carter, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and China Miéville, was awarded from the University of East Anglia.